skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The subjunctive prelude "One might speculate..." signposts the structure at the dozen paragraph scale. The author is both wondering why people play Farmville and providing a description for those unfamiliar with it. He works through a list of hypotheses, stating them and describing the features of Farmville that leads him to reject them.

The proposed alternative sentence is neither informative nor structural.

"People may play Farmville because ..." is uninformative; we were hoping to be informed that "People do play Farmville because ..." or that "People do not play Farmville because ...".

Nor does the sentence help the text flow. It is like encountering an if statement while reading code. Now there are two paths to follow, may and may not. The sentence imposes a cognitive load on the reader, but for no reason. The author is about to explain why not.
I never understood why these services are not simply working over HTTP.
Sorta fluffy article, being that it is all conjecture and nothing mentioned is even remotely quantifiable. I'm a believer in the unquantifiable, but this was an article looking for a premise… which it didn't find.

How about this, the 20/225 rule:

"Professors Cooper and Kaplan at the Harvard Business School have shown that once the cost of supporting customers is taken into account, only about 20 percent of customers are profitable. In fact, these 20 percent of customers account for 225 percent of the profits. Of course, this means that the other 80 percent of customers lose 125 percent of the profits."

-- Pricing with Confidence (an excellent book)
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InfluAds.com is a new startup trying to do the same as Deck, in a wide range of topics.

They are covering Startups, Design, web development and productivity apps I belive.

With top members like venturehacks and answers.onstartups.com, they seem to be doing a good work, even if being 2 month old.

http://influads.com
Actually, you won't find female empowerment halfway up a pole
There's nothing in principle stopping you from storing that data in Redis or CouchDB.
iCranks jokes aside, the biggest point that's important is that great teachers with decent tech can make wonders but great tech can't necessarily fix broken teachers.

Well, the education marketplace in the U.S. is not that organized and I can't think of that many great apps out there I would personally use in an academic setting. The reason why I think Apple has a whack at this because the iPad is very primal in the way you interact with the device; but the App store is what makes the iPxx successful.
The Kerberos reference is a nice touch.
Um... it doesn't sound like they "fooled pirates" it sounds like they took advantage of the bittorrent protocol for exactly what it was designed for: distributing large files.
I suggest you email pg. That seems to be the quickest way to get things like this resolved.

Somehow that submission triggered the 'auto-ban'.
I recently integrated my companies LDAP server with OpenSSO, which also meant integrating Suns LDAP schema and everything, and it was working just fine.
Maybe it's openldap that sucks? Never used it, though.
I don't know why LDAP is bad, it's quite a perfect tool for certain situations, that would be a nightmare with SQL and even more so with NoSQL.
That there are a lot of RFCs is the major negative point the OP makes and there is no reason this is a bad thing, too. The OP just had his first look into RFCs i guess. There are plenty of RFCs for every protocol in use (IMAP for example, even sieve filters have several RFCs).
It's good to have RFCs to look things up, i don't see the negative point here.
Yeah, but only 20% of the time.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
" The idea that while ABS documents are chock full of legalese, a computer program can provide a very concise way of understanding how a financial instrument is supposed to operate."

That is extremely interesting. A good friend of mine is a lawyer and used to work on large financial contracts (with sometimes billions of dollars in a single contract). He would tell me crazy stories about how two legal teams would spend hours arguing over things like the placement of a semicolon. So in reality legal contracts really are code...just a code for lawyers and not computers. I would not be surprised in the least if computer code was more efficient, but it may take just as long to write (if not longer). The upside is that while lawyer code needs to be tested in court, computer code gets tested by compilers and private QA teams, significantly shortening the process and relieving a significant portion of bureaucracy.
I don't really understand his complaints about the lack of compatibility between traditional Cocoa (i.e. Foundation+AppKit) and Cocoa Touch (Foundation+UIKit).

I've been working with Cocoa for years. It took me just an afternoon to port a graphics and audio application from Mac OS X to Cocoa Touch. Granted, it's a pretty simple application [1] designed for maximum cross-platform compatibility by being written in C. But jwz's Dali Clock is even simpler with the same portability goal...

In my experience the changes made in UIKit are perfectly reasonable given the constraints of the platform. In many places Apple has managed to substantially improve the experience of mixing plain-C CoreFoundation and Obj-C Cocoa by lowering the historical "impedance mismatch" between the two that still persists in AppKit. There's nothing wrong with doing an API cleanup when the opportunity for a break with the past presents itself.

[1] http://lacquer.fi/2020
You probably had no experience, the wrong tools and thus a negative experience.

Do you have specific things in mind?
I'd be curious if these figures are similar to those found at universities for these industries?

As an anecdote, I know that in a first year class of around 300 for engineering at my uni, there were 2 women. This was in `99.
clicky: http://www.merchant-advise.co.uk/The_Biggest_Flaw_In_The_PCI...

Looks legit. This auto-complete business is a minefield. For instance, I once missed properly hitting tab/return after the username, and typed the password without looking. For the last year or so, the browser cheerfully shows name+pass as one possible completion. (It's a home computer, account usually locked, no harm in this case. I haven't bothered to look, but how to clean that up is not obvious ...)
Your resume sounds like a 'dream co-founder', both business and technical experience. PG suggesting you apply to YC is probably exactly what hacker news' function is for YC, spotting great talent early on, it also probably means that any application you come up with will be looked at very seriously.

A formal degree is great when you're job-hunting, and to prove that you can go the distance, that you've got stamina. The level you're currently already operating at I doubt that you will get much benefit from such a path, it will keep you 'off the market' for a couple of years and who knows what kind of opportunities will pass you by in that time.

There are lots of people here that think they're ready to go and do a start-up, either because they don't currently have a job or because they're sick of school. Most of them are not 'ready', you - as far as I can see from your brief intro - are 'more than ready'.
in what way does websearch depend on gmail?
That'd be awful:

LDAP is a protocol. NoSQL is a shitload of software that works extremely different and has no protocol or common data scheme.
LDAP is probably most used for organizing a companies data (employees) and works quite well for that. It's proven, it has major software products that are stable and used in worldwide deployments.

Just exchanging LDAP with NoSQL makes no sense and is a move only driven by "LDAP sounds soo old. Let's use that NoSQL everyone is talking about!". And maybe slap XML, Web2.0 and HTML5 on top of it. Just, you know.. it's state of the art!

I've yet to see a comment on this page that relates to the problems of the protocol. Mostly vague points without objective data.

Basing all those criticism on the fact that this protocol has been around or a while and thus has more than one RFC is just stupid.
I always figured that the changes to the names of classes from Cocoa to CocoaTouch were done deliberately to make it difficult to port apps from the Mac. You're knowledge of the APIs transfers pretty well, so if you wrote an app for the Mac, it won't be hard to rewrite for the iPhone, but you will have to rewrite it.

Apple seem to like doing this to force developers to become familiar with a new platform. It's much the same as not providing a command line for the original Mac, hence preventing text-based programming, or indeed not allowing cross-platform dev tools to be used for apps that will be sold on the app store.

From a design perspective, I can understand why they do this. They want apps on their platform to be lovingly crafted, just as they themselves have laboured over their products. But still, it can be frustrating for devs.
The Loop Understanding Scala/Lift's Box[T] monad
It's the same reason why people are on Facebook in the first place, because well, people are on Facebook.
Cool. If you want I'll chip in.
compromise? Sometimes, you have to consider different costs beside direct revenue since that may be hurt in the long-run
It's much the same as not providing a command line for the original Mac, hence preventing text-based programming

Not true. Stephenson even talks about this in In The Beginning Was The Command Line. It was called MPW and provided a very Unix-like experience (Makefiles and so on). The rival was THINK Pascal, and then later CodeWarrior, which were IDEs.
Nobody as in "every company, small and large, I've ever worked for in the software, automotive, telco and banking industry". Also, ActiveDirectory is an LDAP at the end of the day. RedHat just started their own LDAP server with the old Netscape sources a few years ago.

I agree that getting started with LDAP when you are only used to relational databases is a real pain. On top of that, a lot of software with "LDAP support" is pretty bad at it. But once you have it up and running, you can integrate it with almost everything. I'm a big fan of the Sun LDAP Server and all its features like multi-master replication, ACLs and all those neat ways it offers you for modeling your directory data.

Also: "LDAP was originally intended to be a lightweight alternative protocol for accessing X.500 directory services through the simpler (and now widespread) TCP/IP protocol stack." (wikipedia) So that's what that lightweight is all about.

DO NOT mix up LDAP and "single signon" (e.g. kerberos) which are two separate things. You can use LDAP, however, to store your users and passwords and have all kinds of systems use that for authentication and authorization but that is not single signon.
Most SSO products I know use LDAP as their datastore, though.

I have always liked LDAP for its strong standardization and simplicity and LDIF is a plain, simple format that you can easily generate or type by hand. There is not a lot of overhead.
Innovation in rail travel: The train that never stops at a station
His initial goal was to not have to port it -- it was to get it compiling from the same source on both, since they're both Objective-C applications written atop OS X.

What he found was that similar functionality was implemented with an arbitrarily different interface. UIKit is not exactly the same as AppKit (I think it's a little bit cleaner) and breaks AppKit code even for features that are supported on both sides.

If you're used to stable APIs and expect strong justification for changing an interface, especially when there is no apparent change for features supported or efficiency, going from AppKit to UIKit is like having someone flick vinegar off of their finger tips into your eyes.

And if you're used to being able to develop software (using other open source software) on a computer you paid for and run it on a device you paid for without having to pay again and sign a contract limiting your freedom, then it's like getting a right hook to the abdomen.
What you'd really want is something like IMS.
Having worked with over 40 start-ups over the past three years who use LDAP, I have to ask how you define the term "Nobody". That being said, I think LDAP is just as awful as all of the other centralized technologies that came out of old-guard academia in the '80s and '90s.
I have used OpenLDAP and Sun LDAP on several occasions and while the initial learning curve for the whole "LDAP thing" might be steep for both, it was pretty obvious that OpenLDAP simply doesn't offer a lot of features that Sun's LDAP server has.
And I agree with you, OpenSSO is a product where Sun really got it right and I am more than happy it got opensourced.
HN News sorter bookmarklet
PyDev Python IDE: code completion, integrated documentation, debugging
I think this is a function of age.

I'm only 30 now, but I'm starting to get crusty when shit changes for the sake of changing shit :)
Yes. But apparently Oracle abandoned the project.
Looks like it is continued by ForgeRock: http://forgerock.com/openam.html

All that a few weeks after i recommended OpenSSO to a client.. sheez.. :P
I loved a Tale of Two Cities. Amazing writing. Just amazing. The scene where they're escaping from Paris is just incredible.
Russia and Iran have democratically elected presidents. How is that non-democratic?. Democracy does not mean "complying to US dictates". Fully agree with the overall point though.
Another day (Apr 18 11:54:41 WEST 2010), layers about steady.

A couple of KLM 737s over the Netherlands, a Piper over Germany, an A320 at 29,000 ft over eastern Austria ...
Insofar as negative gearing is a good thing, it's not a good thing for renters.

Investors need to be losing money for negative gearing to do them any good, and it won't magically turn that investment into something profitable.

It is helpful if they're speculating on a big capital gain. In fact that's one of the recurring criticisms of negative gearing - that it encourages speculation and inflates property prices, neither of which are good things for renters.

People have, inevitably, used it to engage in various tax-reduction schemes, with varying degrees of succes (see the 2004 Australian High Court case of Hart v Commissioner of Taxation for an example of that _not_ working out). This is not a good thing for renters either.
Afaik, the are making deals with news organizations.
JWZ makes no sense what so ever. I'm sure he's really good at some kind of programming, or at least that he once was, but he often talks from what he thinks is a position of insight, while actually he's quite ignorant.

The first commenter's explanation of why OpenGL and OpenGLES differ is a fantastic example. JWZ simply never bothered to learn enough about the subject in the first place, but comfortably speaks about the "defining characteristics" of it.

Reminds me of a similar hubbub when he proclaimed that CSS is bullshit and decided to stick with table-based markup, this because CSS (in April of 2003), required a span inside of a h1 to replace his table-soup (to mark up just a headline), when he'd prefer just a h1. http://jwz.livejournal.com/193866.html

Being talented in programming is simply not a binary situation, which JWZ shows quite well: he might be really good at some things, I really don't know, but he is also really ignorant in some of the other things he rants about with confidence.
So, in the same spirit...

Why nobody uses DNS:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/np.html#DNS
I'm not entirely sure where you're trying to go with this. There was no command-line mode for the Mac. You couldn't take e.g. Wordstar (good grief, it's been a while since I last typed that name!) , and run it with little modification on a Mac. You would first have to write a GUI-based console for your text-only app to run in. There was no console SDK. Yes, it was possible to do, but as it would take as much work as writing the app as a proper GUI app anyhow, you might as well forget about the console.
Introducing Sharpy - an ASP.NET MVC view engine based on Smarty
I assume there is a front-loaded initial startup cost of oxygen to initiate combustion that is difficult to do at higher altitudes primarily because the turbines are not spinning (and therefore aren't pulling oxygen into the engines).

Air speed might make it easier to get the turbines up to speed again, but I would make an uneducated guess that the oxygen concentration of the surrounding atmosphere is more important; I think it's likely the engines will contribute much more to turbine rotation than air speed.

Moreover, the engines won't come up to full power instantly; they will need time to throttle up as well... in this case, glide time is more important than air speed.

Ergo, the altitude is more important for the purposes of restarting the engines. (... Except for the "tangential" need that the operator needs to be conscious to restart the engines, and thus needs sufficient oxygen concentrations in the cabin)
KLM pushes to resume passenger flights after tests
I could be misremembering, but I thought there was some pretty big hubbub over Iran's election!
World news issues trends: George Washington's $300,000 library book fine
Also Lightspeed C, if memory serves, got in early dibs. Worked nicely, many fewer floppies than MPW. Was IDE, though.

P.S. demallien is completely right. S.O.P. was to hang your code from the GUI event loop (skeleton samples provided).
All the relevant content seems to be at the bottom, no? Most of it seems to be fluff that says "You need to learn math so you can learn more math."

The only meat seemed to be:

"Math trains and disciplines your mind."

"Math helps you learn to:

* Identify and analyze patterns.

* Develop logic and critical thinking.

* See relationships.

* Solve real world problems."

1, 2, and 3 seem questionable to me. 4 is just a gimme - everything you learn in school can be used to solve real world problems if you stretch your rationalization sufficiently.

What sort of logic is it that learning math supposedly trains? I'm up to linear algebra, and I'm using a fair amount of sticking to rules of systems, but not so much "a implies b" sort of logic.

The above is intended to inquire, not assert.
Could you substantiate your assertion? I don't necessarily disagree, but I've not heard this assertion before.
Pediatric Environmentalism
Well, you said there was no text-based programming, whereas I remember doing it... I'm pretty sure you could run your code in the MPW shell and use STDIN and STDOUT as per any C program of the time. CodeWarrior also had this, called WASTE there.
UPDATE: this tutorial has been added to the Camelot documentation: http://downloads.conceptive.be/downloads/camelot/doc/sphinx/.... It has better code display. Even with indentations!
cdto is great to have! To reverse this type "open ." in the terminal and your finder will open in that directory too.
- it makes the system second-guess in more places. Means more complexity - understandingly some bugs to fix (tinyurl.com/http-strip)

- the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable.

Now either the site owners have to jump through the hoops to replicate the second-guessing logic to their sites, or everyone who views the URL, will have to copy/paste manually.

Another couple of questions I will start asking as a user: why does the ftp:// thing pops up in front of the URL if I use it ? And, what is https:// and why is it suddenly there when I only want to go to gmail.com ?

This change noticeably increases the number of places which violate the principle of least surprise. But maybe I am a corner-case :-)

EDIT:

And, if we look at the whole "address bar" under the same UI angle - the path and the query string is equally a useless technobabble for anyone non-geek. So, I think we would go further and just show the host name, while we are at it.
Here's a brief post about this video from a few years ago: http://www.goodcleantech.com/2008/07/futuristic_train_lets_p...
Very interesting! I'm noticing that I'm starting to trend in the opposite direction.

Yes, the main stream aggregation have too much noise to signal, and niche sites like HN, or certain subreddits, have very high signal to noise and have invaluable comments.

I'm noticing that I enjoy certain blogs reliably, though, and I have a greasemonkey script on the backburner to highlight posts on HN that come from a list of favorite domains. (Same for commenters whose opinions I often find valuable.) It would be cool if I could add weight to specific domains (in the context of the algorithm that decides what's on my HN frontpage).
Narratives over Numbers
Version with explanation in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K27VmNfwsaQ
3 Common PPC Marketing Mistakes
qq829.com: Malicious Scripts or Spam from China?
I'm still wondering what the docking looks like. Somehow people need to get from the connector cabin to the train and back. This could also result in a lot of people moving back and forth within the train over 20 stops if you can only get in and out at the back of it.
Why Zynga Should Worry About the Laffer Curve
Buried in the details of the indictment, they show Wiseguys had a reciprocating agreement with downstream broker clients to provide virgin credit cards used in the bulk ticket purchases. i.e. Give me a clean card with a high($100k+) limit, and pay an X% "service charge", then I'll buy you any tickets you want using my scalper-bot-net.

I'm not sure what the exact rules are for requiring a real identity to be linked to a corporate credit card. In this case, the broker's corp cards were not being used in the same way a typical employee would expense a purchase to the business. Rather, Wiseguys was just making up fake identities, and providing their own employees real identities for cards(this was the mistake that got them noticed). All of this is pretty straight forward financial fraud on the banking side of things, and not Ticketmaster's ToS.
Mortgages vary, but it's been known to happen It's not a penalty per se, it's just that if you pay twice as much as your next monthly payment, all you gain is an extra month before your next payment is due. It's not a free-floating line of credit--it's an agreement that you will pay this amount per month for 30 years, and there are no discounts for going faster than the schedule requires.

Think of it in this way: as an investment, I'm making a secured loan to you from which I am expecting a given return over the next 30 years. If you're excited to pay me off in 5 years instead of 30, maybe we can make a deal (quite often there's refinancing involved in that arrangement) but I got into this deal expecting 30 years, not 5 years, of interest at that rate, and you agreed to that, too.
Just Doing It
Isn't Akihabara like the tech-mecca of Japan?
Perhaps this is a good example of what E. Tufte calls "chartjunk" in his book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".
Twitter clients on the desktop suck.

yorufukurou does regex and is generally tolerable (OS X)
http://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/home-en

Apart from that, it's easy to roll your own stuff - for example using the tweepy python library.
I know my way around Unix, and am a fast learner, so "no experience" is not something that generally scares me. I know I'll make some mistakes and waste a bit of time.

That said, there are plenty of systems that I have encountered in my years that are much friendlier to a new user. Specifically, I recall awful command line queries, kind of wonky tools in general, and, generally, a fiddly feeling to the whole thing. I did get things working, but I was never really happy with the whole setup. We ended up calling in a consultant to check over my work and see if there were ways to improve it, and aside from a few things, there really weren't.
I wouldn't fly on those planes.