skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything.

For everyone I know that actually uses Facebook [1], this is essentially true. FB users don't do things on the net. They do things on FB. Excursions to sites/services outside of Facebook are the exception.

I've been calling it "AOL all-over-again" for a few years now. (I'm behind the curve, I'm sure; I don't do social networks).

[1] Subtracting out those who use it for professional reasons.
It's not up to the rest of the world to make sure your little rituals aren't disturbed. Leaks happen. If you want somebody to blame for spoiling your Christmas look to Apple. Though I suspect it won't be a problem anymore since they'll probably be sending out a Secret Service detail with these things from now on.
This Week in Venture Capital – Episode 3
For Ruby, I can highly recommend this series of articles:
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/understanding_m17n
iPad sad trombone moment. ;)
Sure, they violated the law. Now what?

(People ignore the law all the time. They eat plants that are illegal to eat. They cross the street against the light. They steal their work contacts for their next job. They post the internal documents about their employer's plan to kill small children to wikileaks.

Selling a phone you found in a bar doesn't seem like much of a risk in this context -- best case, you get $10,000 and to stick it to Apple. Worst case, you get $10,000 and 20 hours of community service.

If Gizmodo gets in legal trouble, the solution is simple -- next time, we'll just see this story in a non-US media outlet. People want interesting reading more than they want to follow the law.)
So many sites get their reputation system slightly wrong, and end up incentivizing behaviors that they claim to not want. On discussion forums with reputation systems, the "echo chamber" effect is encouraged - it's been a running joke on slashdot since before the term "online reputation system" was coined. Also, early replies get viewed and upvoted more often, encouraging quick responses over more thoughtful (but later!) ones.
The article did say "like most", not "like all".
This is a bigger issue than simple exposure. Students studying finance/econ at Ivy League schools are on a track that starts early (our author, I assume, applied directly to Penn's Wharton School). The expectations and goals start in high school then, sometimes earlier. It's hard to get away from those expectations and pressure, and students emerge at the end of the conveyor belt onto Wall Street before they even know it, ready to earn their "seven in seven" (a milly in seven years).

I think the bigger deal here is talking about start-ups as a viable career option all around (cultural shfit?), and encourage kids (high school and college) to experiment while in school, since risk is relatively low and time is readily available for most. A better system of on campus incubator/meet-up programs would be a nice complement, too.
My TV is Better and Cheaper then Your TV
Or the specs were just obvious. Apple already released a next-gen device running iPhoneOS with the A4 processor. And their competitors are all hyping massive-res screens and front-facing cameras.

Apple would be insane not to do exactly what Gruber predicted.
It could be that the department recommends that they take the class, not that they chose to take it themselves; many departments at my college recommend taking CSC120 to fill a prereq.
I haven't used Microsoft Office as long as I can remember. I keep OpenOffice installed on my machines just so I'll be able to open certain documents that other people inevitably send me. For my uses google docs and basic text editors suffice and I imagine that there are millions of others like myself.

Lightweight, efficient, and fast are the core features I need.
When was the last time you surfed the net? 5 seconds ago.

Can you remember when you just clicked around looking to discover new sites or a site to occupy your time? Yes, I remember this morning.

Now ask yourself when was the last time you sat on your couch or laid in bed clicking the remote looking for something to watch on TV? I remember last evening quite well.

Finally, how long do you regularly spend on Facebook ? Zero, nada, nuttin'.

How much time do you spend checking out your Wall, your friends’ Wall and hopping from profile to profile checking people out? First, I thought the previous question was "finally"...Still, Zero, nada, nuttin'

And, I'm not alone, not by a longshot.

I've heard non-tech news commentators make the mistake that Facebook is somehow a distinct technology than the Internet on which it lives. I think the author of the article is similarly confused. Does he/she see cars as the new freeways?

Facebook loves to try and define itself as "a platform". I guess to see one's self that way, one must deny or ignore the actual platform on which one depends. For the gullible in its ranks, that characterization seems to work well.
The whole point is that apple is capable enough of engineering such an incident.
And that whiner has no right to complain after being part of apple's insidious plans.
Yes, it just tells you that the detector seems to work. High energy physics experiments mostly rely on statistical analysis of large numbers of events these days. There are occasionally situations where there may be a single decisive "golden event", but b-quark physics left that stage decades ago. Now it is mostly about tiny, tiny differences between normal matter and antimatter that only manifest themselves in b and anti-b quark decays and which may explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

[And ugh, when did CERN PR resurrect that stupid "beauty" moniker, everybody has been using bottom and top instead of the pretentious beauty and truth for the third generation quarks since I can remember.]
Agreed. Apple products are cool and all but there really is much cooler stuff going on out there than a marginally upgraded iPhone.
Beyond Survival | canadaimmigrant.org
Also in the areas where HTML5 is not a good replacement, I would still like to see an open alternative over Flash. A closed alternative is just no solution (for me), that's why I also want to see it dying. Once its dead, there will be replacements for it (if there is need for it).
> can't delete it outright for some reason!

The hotel California approach to growing your userbase.
YouTube Movie and TV Show Rental Store Now Open
This analogy would work better if Gizmodo destroyed the prototype, all of its blueprints, and murdered the engineers behind the project.

Or, for that matter, did anything but hold a pin to an over-inflated hot air balloon.
There are several. Here's one you can buy from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Archos-32-Internet-Tablet-Android/dp/B...

There are many others that you can buy directly from China.
http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=86

Pretty much sums it up!
NPR is worth listening to.
While I don't agree that Google Docs sucks (I think it's "adequate" - not a ringing endorsement - for a simple majority of users' needs) I would like to see improvements.

Here's why they are coming: Chrome OS.

Chrome OS is predicated on solid HTML 5 support and web apps just like Google Docs. You can't sell a billion Chrome OS netbooks to IT departments without a solid office suite.

We just saw gears getting phased out, now we'll see HTML 5 offline support phased in and then we'll see some new features.

I've gone crazy waiting for new features as well in google apps. For instance, contact sharing. Seriously. Why so long? As a consultant in these matters I'd like a better roadmap so I can reassure clients that features are either on or off the horizon.
The only thing right about this article is that office applications online are not as mature as the desktop.

It would be much fairer to point out that applications in the browser are limited because the browser platform needs further evolution to make applications more usable and reliable. Google has taken quite a lead in this area.
Including mechanisms for printing wherever you are, speeding up the browser and allowing users to work off-line. All without plugins.

Microsoft's offering relies on Silverlight for some features.
I think you're in the minority on that one.
Gotta agree on this one.
On top of that it's a windows 98 bluescreen.
Should probably take into considerations the upgrades to Google Docs that are currently being rolled out (http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-google-docs.html). Wave like real-time collaborative editing, entirely new backed that doesn't depend on browser editing quirks ec. I'm looking forward to them and think they will solve a lot of the annoyances I have had with document editing with Docs.

I say annoyances, because the value of collaborative editing and online sharing outweigh them.
There's a web server and application server included, along with sample code for a blog, a web-based prompt and the software behind news.yc. The Anarki repo has a lot of valuable community contributions, like help and source reference from the REPL, interfaces/implementations to other languages including Java, an IDE and modes + syntax highlighting for emacs and vim and a way to escape into PLT Scheme/Racket for access to all that Lisp has to offer. Of course it comes with threading, I/O, math/date/time operations etc.

This is just off the top of my head, I've surely omitted much. If you want to know more:

Arc Forum - http://arclanguage.org/forum

Tutorial - http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt

Install guide - http://arclanguage.org/install

Unofficial documentation - http://files.arcfn.com/foundation-doc.html
Of course you don't. That would be like having to get your own patent license to use iTunes.

Although you do actually need a license to use the QuickTime AAC encoder in your own program, but only on Windows. Or so I remember from mailing list traffic, haven't tried it myself.
Red pens put people on power trips [pdf]
A huge company like Google can not only rely on search and people liking their search to survive. They are always looking over their shoulder at this point, looking out for any new "Cool" company that will threatens their search bread. I think folks at Google are a bit worry at this time because the only reason why people still go for Google instead of Yahoo is still mostly the Cool Factor and likability thing; that is not a solid platform for a company to rely on.

So I think with Docs Google tried hard as they do every day to position themselves outside of search. It’s like a great singer with only one popular song, who tries hard to come up with new stuff without convincing his fans.
As often happens, everyone is in the minority,

http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/files/2010/04/Question-21.pn...
I deactivated my account (can't delete it outright for some reason!)

I haven't tried this myself, but here

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

is supposedly advice on how to permanently delete a Facebook account. Maybe some HN participant will do the experiment and report back to us how it goes.

I do know (from my son trying the experiment) that Facebook account deactivation is very rapidly reversible.
You can get a lethal weapon with no sound in a silenced .22 firing subsonic ammo. You have to be close or a fantastic shot for it to be lethal. (This is basically a hitman's gun. Think shooting someone in the back of the head at point blank range.) The only noise is the clink of the hammer going down and the slap of the bullet hitting the target.

It's hard to get a silencer legally, though. (You can't even make one or sell plans to make one in the US.) And the range thing is limiting.
Gruber's aggression toward Gizmodo fans the flames - he knows this, he's in the business of page views - and off the story shoots, racking up ad impressions for everyone. The only one to come out badly from this is the poor guy that got a little bit drunk and lost his phone.
The article is from 3 years ago.
Is that actually legal? I thought that any spoofing of information to gain access to information was illegal
The only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree
"Customers need to stop being satisfied with the status quo and queue up for whatever you are going to deliver."

I thought this was key.
Sounds cool, I'd gladly do something like that if they were paying me. I think a good solution is to define a well-scoped project and bring candidates on board on a contract basis to implement them. This contract basis project can even be done remotely. This offers the candidate a chance to learn about you, you can learn about the candidate, and in the end you can both decide what is best for you.
yes but "noone supports new web standards" is a self fulfilling prophecy, we all know users dont know or care about what is happening under the hood, they arent going to push for ie to support canvas.

as web developers we need to be pushing canvas and font-face and webgl etc and stop running back to propietary plugins every time a font kinda looks not exactly the same on every other machine as mine.

Its pretty unarguable that open standards are fundamentally better than proprietary formats, a single company owning the format the web runs on would be disastrous, instead of opening this gap to push flash into, I think energy is better spent pressuring those involved to help push web standards to a point where flash is not needed, if every website didnt support ie6 tomorrow, next week ie6 would not exist, obviously that is a contrived situation but the fact is its us web developers that need to make sacrifices to make things work better on the users behalf, they cant and shouldnt be expected to do it themselves.
How more open do you want it? You are free to make your own player against the open specification.

Fully open isn't the answer for everything. Flash is the most widely distributed piece of software ever - it got that way by NOT being forked and offering what HTML didn't both in terms of consistency and features.
every time one of his theories gets shot down, he just moves on to the next one

So ... when faced with facts that contradict his theories, he modifies his theories so as to be consistent with the facts. Isn't this what, you know, a real scientist should do?
So, in other words, it's something entirely different. Maybe you should call it something else.

"Those who aren’t terribly familiar with the protocol may wonder why OAuth 2.0 isn’t just rolled into support of the OAuth gem (or why I didn’t fork it and do it that way). Honestly, I would have liked to, but OAuth 2.0 is an almost entirely different beast than 1.0a and they share so little functionality that it would basically be two projects living under the same gem name."
Have you dealt with a law troll?
I'm a cofounder of a 3-man Web startup. Recently a competitor sent us a threatening letter accusing us of stealing their proprietary information, and now they have begun filing patent applications. Their accusation was baseless, and their patent application is so broad it seems to cover anything with interactive data plots.

Anyway, the specifics of the accusation or patent aren't the issue here, and I am not asking HN for legal advice. We already have a lawyer. I am asking for practical business advice from people who have been through something similar.

Have you dealt with a law troll? What did you do?
Me neither. I've been using for everything for about a year now. when I upgraded to Win 7 I forgot to reinstall my copy of MS office and I don't really miss it. Microsoft's product is better but I don't need the advanced features all that often.

I've gone crazy waiting for new features as well in google apps. For instance, contact sharing.

Agree that further integration would be good, and things like project management and so on. Google has been advertising heavily recently about companies 'going Google' by switching to Docs, and there's great potential yet to be exploited.
I gave a presentation for those guys last week!

The big takeaway for me was use less text and focus more on the narrative than the nitty-gritty details.
How to Trick Users into Liking Facebook Pages They're Not On
The CSS 3 Flexible Box Model
It didn't bring HN down. HN deliberately didn't rely on that server for anything except hosting static content that was also duplicated on this server. I planned in advance for the possibility that the other server wouldn't be usable, by writing the code so that I could switch to serving the same content off news by changing one variable, which I did. As a result service was barely affected.

In short, Pair flaked, but we had in fact planned the system in a way that protected us against it.
As I have related in another HN thread, I actually enjoy the friend-mash-up aspect of Facebook. I am more than twice as old as the median HN participation age (I'm pretty sure), and I have lived in more than one country, so I have friends from various eras of my life and various places. Now on Facebook I post a lot of links (some of which I learn about here on HN, with a hat tip in gratitude) and friends comment about those links, with all sorts of interesting discussions with diverse viewpoints. Friends of mine who have never, ever met one another are good virtual friends as they meet up in my discussion threads. There are even FB friends of my FB friends who have asked me to become directly FB-friended by me (a request I have honored) so that they can get in on all the link postings. This has been a fun and unexpected aspect of FB for me. I block ads on Facebook and all other websites, and I use Facebook Purity to block other FB annoyances. I never, ever play FB games or do anything on FB that directly costs me money. I like the way I can free-ride on FB and enjoy a service monetized by people who have less intellectual ways of having fun.
Facebook Accounts for Half Social Traffic; StumbleUpon 2X Twitter
And Flash 10.1 won't be shipped for at least another six months. The beta release with DXVA was only released in November.
You're facing an uphill battle of convincing the HN community when you say "IE is the best out of the modern browsers."
> I think the key here is how Apple deals with it now that everyone is watching.

Andrey predicts [1] that the new iPhone launch will be canceled (or delayed?), and that Gizmodo will pay dearly for the leak.

1. http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/540380259/two-points-about-th...
I think I've got my dream job, but three years ago I said the same thing about the last job, and three years prior I said the same thing about the job before that, so your guess is as good as mine what my dream job will be three years from now.
I love the solution he offers: "people are just going to have to be made aware of the threat."
On what planet is hacking into voicemail legal?
The article wasn't talking about drawing or graphics, but rendering things like DIVs as Cubes and arranging standard html objects in a 3D space.
I don't remember reading a post about you developing that goal and specifically how you attained it. Did you ever write about it in detail?
I can only wonder how long until the whole model behind Word gets perceived as completely obsolete.

Word comes from the ages when you edited a document, passed it along and then printed it for someone who should read it. This is not what we do anymore.
Scientific Opinion on Climate Change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...

Looks like almost everyone's in agreement, there.
VERY much agree with this; why didn't I have a Sequoia-backed high school startup program? VCs/angels are the ones with the money to support this; forget about the gov't doing it, that's bound for disaster. And maybe these do exist somewhere, maybe in SF.

Great point; I'll talk about this more in a follow-up post someday. (BTW, I didn't go to Wharton, I studied math and physics @ Penn, with full intention of becoming a research professor)
The difference between Facebook and eBay is the overwhelming success of the FB platform. Yesterday, Mark said that it only took a fraction of the time to get to 100MM connect users than it did for normal FB users. They are betting big again on the platform by basically giving publishers even more power with social plugins and the graph api.

You are trivializing FB by saying it's just a templating engine for people who don't want to design their own webpage. FB is much more than that, and they will be even more interesting if they prove their graph api idea.

In this way, FB is more like a Google than an eBay.
I’d assumed everyone used the git protocol for the most part. I guess HTTP is easier if you’re stuck behind a restrictive firewall?
I'm surprised my reason isn't more common, but maybe it's included in some other category. I want to know which of my add-ons won't work before I install the update.
I've been working on the word rectangle problem, too. Care to share your '7x7 in 60-ish seconds' solution? Or at least some hints on how you approached the problem? I'd be much obliged, as they say.
Again, though, the method is what he says offends him.

And, honestly, in such a case as this almost anyone is going to have the first reaction along the lines of "this device is almost certainly stolen" no matter how good the purported finder's tale may be...and this one's excuse seems pretty threadbare.

Engadget (apparently) reacted by publishing the photos that accompanied the shady proposal; e.g. they got the story but stayed out of the morass. Gizmodo (again, apparently) reacted by accepting the shady proposal...this is what dismays Gruber who, as someone noted above, is going to be painted with the same (admittedly) broad brush as a result and suffer its consequences, large or small.
Gruber gave the exact screen resolution, which was far from obvious (as, to my knowledge, no other phone has been released with that resolution).
IANAL but I'd ignore it. Especially the patent applications. A patent application is far removed from a patent, and even an issued patent is not that dangerous a weapon between two startups.

You're 100x more likely to die from not making something users want than from this. So worry about the tiger chasing you rather than the possibility you'll be hit by a meteorite.
Uh, or just program the modern browser to work the way you like. I don't whine about jpeg or gif or png ads, even though my browser supports them just fine. I simply have my browser not show them to me.
The part of working at a startup that I enjoy most is not working with I-bank/management consulting type people. My favorite part: "a rotational program between Sequoia’s portfolio companies". Hilarious.
There’s plenty of evidence of Steve unveiling products that have leaked without problems. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwsn27J_tlo

As he calls it, it’s just a case of ‘premature specification’.
I didn't like the latest change in how the awesome bar functions, at first, because it was a change, but I've learned by experience to make the awesome bar quite deterministic in what site it will show me first when I type just a few keystrokes. That's an amazing example of machine adaptation to human behavior.
Now that the honeymoon has ended, just buy an Android phone and move on with your life.

I like new gadgets and everything, but I don't care about the build-up. I like the HTC Evo 4G. I added my email address to the "tell me when it's ready" list. When I get the email, I will walk over to the Sprint store and pick it up. I will enjoy the phone just as much as if it was announced by some CEO in a turtleneck... and I can even plan for the purchase in advance!

There are some things in life worth thinking about. What resolution the screen of a new telephone is going to be is not one of those things.