skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author makes a compelling case for Flash as a vector of innovation, but he really misses the case against Flash. I haven't seen any critiques of Flash based around the idea that it's "conformist". Rather, the critiques focus on one or more of the following issues:

* It breaks web standards like persistent URLs and the back button (granted, there are some workarounds) and eschews native UI elements.

* It is inaccessible to visually impaired users.

* It is built on closed, proprietary technology, which raises both principled and pragmatic concerns (one pragmatic concern is the poor security framework, which might be ameliorated by more eyeballs on the source code).

* It tends to emphasize superfluous visuals over meaningful content (this isn't a requirement of Flash but it's a common result arising from Flash's dominant motifs).

And finally, a posterior observation:

* An awful lot of Flash applications just suck.
Reddit open sourced their codebase, but obviously didn't shut down.
Yes, actually, we did have someone from a competitor call Viaweb, telling us that we should license some bogus patent they'd been granted. I told the guy we thought the patent was bogus and we weren't interested, and he replied by asking if we were hiring.

You can't ignore all legal threats, but I usually advise startups we fund to ignore threats from competitors involving IP.
I think you're mostly right, except that the definition of species comes from does breed with, rather than could.

Also, in your example, your ancestor of 10 generations ago cannot breed with one of his contemporaries but 10 years junior, because they're both dead. This isn't hair-splitting, it provides the practical answer to your question. There's no potential for mingling genetic material between those two organisms today.
MonoTouch and iPhone OS 4 Update
Satellites Will Issue Speeding Tickets from Space
@apsurd @cheesemuffler thanks so much for your honest feedback. i'm going to give it another iteration tonight (and then schedule some more customer development calls)!!!
Stop chasing followers: The web is not a numbers game
This Swede left his country "over taxes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Bergman#Tax_evasion_char...

How much more abusive would you guess the IRS is vs. Sweden's equivalent?
CSV dump of reddit voting data
1.) Well, at first it doesn't. What makes things clear is your caption below your logo. Please make that more visible.

2.) If it's really one click, yes.

3.) A change of color scheme. The egg is cute, in a very ethnic geekery way. =)
It seems to add another potential source of Facebook-friend awkwardness, though, where you have to friend someone you were assigned to work on a group project with, who isn't really a friend, in order to access some docs.
You can sort of predict some "black swans" (a poor term). But to benefit from them you don't need to predict them, just watch for them so you can see them coming before anyone else.
SSH-related issues on Vista consumed, oh, about three days of my life. Using Putty: not bad at all. Tunneling over SSH to do anything useful like Capistrano deploys or Git: owwwwwwwwwww.
He gave the exact rumored screen resolution, Gizmodo was never able to verify it other than it appeared higher res.
Right, they were pretty effective at ending ThinkSecret. No reason to believe that they wouldn't be just as happy to end Gizmodo too.
Google Docs is great for some purposes. If you just want to get information down in a basic structured manner for sharing and collaborating on, it's perfectly adequate. I use it frequently for internal material.

But when you care about presentation - about making documents which can be printed or rendered to PDF and look good, Google Docs plainly sucks. It's just the wrong tool for the job when presentation counts for something.

Even just considered as a WYSIWYG HTML editor, Docs is primitive compared to some js components out there. Working with tables is a joke in Docs, and this is just one glaring deficiency of many.
http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/42031
Preventing a bad back (and numerous other health benefits) seem to be worth at least that amount.
Foursquare + Your Business
I was not aware that it was possible for an institution to have an opinion.
That's not the case. With Instant Personalization, "partner sites" do, in fact, get access to your information just from you visiting them while logged into Facebook. With Social Plugins, any site can embed a widget that works like you described, but as soon as you interact with it, that site will be able to find that interaction by tracking back to the page that Facebook sets up.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/help/?page=1068
Getting an investment from a company that is second rate immediately qualifies a startup as second rate [...]

Interesting -- so really it's just a signaling exercise. That makes sense, given how poor investors are at directly measuring quality.

Thanks for the explanation! One of the things I appreciate most about HN is the willingness of experienced people to provide this sort of insight to us newbies. :-)
'Brilliance' and a degree from a name-brand institution can help one achieve success -- but is no guarantee. Never has been, and never should be.

Our wonderful system of capitalism and free markets make it such that one can bring whatever one has to the table: degrees, IQ scores, grit, sheer experience, connections, and even mere hope. Some are able to be very, very successful by applying only 2 or 3 of these. No single one is a guarantee.
I'd love to hear some thoughts on foursquare's monetization.
Very succinct. Concur completely. Flash has its place (video, games; both of which HTML5 are catching quickly up to). Its place isn't in making an entire, un-navigable, un-deep-linkable, animation-heavy site that takes me ten minutes to figure out how to use.

One of the comments on there said, "but check out thewfa! You can't make THOSE websites in html5!"

And my immediate, lizard brain response was: "Why would I want to? I bet their bounce rates are through the roof, and their return traffic approaches nil."
You're mixing up copyright and property law [1]. If you record Lady Gaga humming an unreleased song in public, she still retains her copyright to the tune, and can pursue you for damages, especially if you sell that recording for $5000 to someone who makes a lot of money off of it.

They benefited from reporting on a lost or stolen object.

Precisely! That reporting just happens to include distributing a derivative work of Apple's copyrighted material (the design of the phone). And because of the distribution, Apple has incurred quantifiable damages. IANAL, but that's one of the keys of a successful copyright violation suit: proving damages. Such "reporting" is covered under "free speech" as much as distributing an unreleased movie would be (i.e. not much).

1. I edited the article to say "copyright" instead of "IP" explicitly
it will "stand" just as java applets "stand" today. it will still be supported, but it will be seen as a clunky alternative to open technologies that are supported on a wider variety of devices, many of which won't have flash support for any number of reasons.

i say this as a user with three major devices (computer, phone, and tablet) that have no flash support, and am happy to see the proliferation of more open technologies and the doing away with of proprietary, insecure, buggy crutches like flash.
Oh, not looking for lethality. I think there could be a market for a distracting weapon.
The first time someone threatened to sue my startup I took it very seriously and spent a lot of time worrying about it. I also ran up some legal bills talking to my counsel about it.

The second time someone threatened to sue my startup I took it seriously and spent some time researching their claims but didn't bother with the counsel, since lawyers are pricey.

The third time someone threatened to sue my startup I did a quick Google search on their name, archived the e-mail, and got on with it.

Since once you've been at this for a while you'll get desensitized to idle threats, I recommend learning from my experience and skipping to the blasé stage immediately.
Brevity is not an end in itself but simply one goal of good writing. This means: don't pad, don't over-elaborate, don't meander. Keep your writing focused for its purpose.

But, if that purpose is, for example, to explain the meaning of restricted stock and, as a lawyer, you tell a client that such stock is granted but made subject to repurchase at cost upon termination of a service relationship between the company and the recipient, creating a risk of forfeiture and thereby requiring that an 83(b) election be filed so as avoid having artificial income imputed to the holder as vesting occurs, that is a perfectly fine if windy way to express oneself and creates no difficulty or misunderstanding for the reader (at least I hope not). There is room for variety in writing, and no writer should feel handcuffed by an artificial need to keep things brief.

That said, by all means be brief where you can, and do aim for brevity as a worthy goal of your writing. Just don't obsess about it. It has its place. That is all.

Overall, a very nice piece.
I have been using such desk for the past 5 years and will never go back (maybe like switching to Dvorak + Typematrix). Anyway, in Europe, you can buy just the electrical part and mount your own desk on it.

I bought my one here:
http://www.bueromoebel-werksverkauf.de/inwerk_bm/sofort_lief...

You can find it through other dealers (this one is in fact a drop ship company specialized in office stuff). It is cheap but the start/stop of the motor is a bit rough, better not to have a full cup of coffee on your desk at the same time. I had one in Denmark with a very soft stort/stop but it was way more expensive (1500Eur+).
I, too, imagine that customers wouldn't appreciate the controversy. But what do I know? Has anyone had a positive (or negative) outcome from publicizing a legal threat?
Is this newsworthy? Where I work, all desks are motorized. Some even store up to three different heights, for easy access without fiddling to get the right height.
That's awesome. I love that the secret sauce turned out to be Simpson's quotes.
I think at this point Danny has learned his lesson about not promising more than he can deliver. If he was contacted by another accelerator which said that they might be interested in taking Status.ly, he's exactly right to say "possibly".
It sounds like you need to train yourself to strike the keys with less force... That in and of itself is better for your body, too.
As long as there's no user-visible changes and it just silently fixes some internal bug, I'm okay with that. I'd be annoyed if anything user-visible changed without Chrome telling me it was upgrading, though.

(And the real push-back will probably come if a silent update accidentally breaks things, so I guess there's extra incentive to make sure that doesn't happen.)
That doesn't seem feasible, most people (that I know) leave FF running all the time; or if they do close it the last thing they want is the application taking even longer to shut down because it wants to ask about running some updates. Think about the scene from Office Space.

Nagging people while they're trying to do stuff obviously isn't ideal either. So as just about everyone has mentioned: Chrome's silent updates are a big win for convenience. Because should the average user really have to think about keeping their software up to date?
To put that in perspective, right now, somewhere around 60%
of the browsers in the hands of users aren’t capable of
rendering the canvas tag.

That's unfortunate choice of words. A lot of browsers that users actually have in hands—those on iPads, iPhones, iPods Touch are indeed better off with canvas, not Flash. I know there is a promise to have Flash on mobiles anytime soon, but not on Apple's devices, and those make up for a huge part of mobile browsing.
Oh, I misunderstood what you said; apologies.

And I don't know if you're right; I work at a startup, and my search was almost exclusively relegated to VC-backed companies; in fact, manyt of my friends at startups went through a similar thought process. Given that, I would imagine it would work?

Everyone is an entrepreneur, some just need more help than others, that's all I'm suggesting.
I'd like to clarify that Protocols just generate a bunch of functions and a Protocol object (and an interface, but that's an implementation/interop detail). The functions are the interesting things in most cases. However, they're also namespaced like everything else. You can do the following though:

user> (defprotocol Foo (describe [object]))
user> (extend-type java.lang.String
Foo
(describe [string] "a String"))
(ns bar)
bar> (user/describe "String") -> "a String"
bar> (extend-type java.lang.Object
user/Foo
(describe [obj] "an Object"))
bar> (in-ns 'user)
user> (describe 3) -> "an Object"
user> (describe "Hello") -> "a String"

So there is potential for two libraries extending the same things and causing a conflict if the semantics differ, but I'm not too concerned about that. It would be rather rude to extend someone else's protocol to cover someone else's java class without documenting that you do so.
Oh yeah? Where I work, we have cotton candy and ferris wheels instead of email.

(Yes, it's news to some of us.)
Will knowing this concept affect the meta-cognitive ability of a person?

Will those that were underestimating their ability start to correctly/over estimate it? i.e if they buy this concept.

Will those that were over estimating their abilities before, start to realize they were over estimating?

Will those that want to look/sound smart start to fake humility, since underestimating one's ability may give the idea that he is smart?

Oh well, ...
Hmm, well it's not so bad then. If I want to stay anonymous then I'll not click on the like or comment or whatever. Seems reasonable.
What an absurd ego battle. I'm sorry I took the bait to read it.

You can stop with the False Choice that opens the piece: Who's the hero of the startup universe? Is it the entrepreneur, or is it the investor?
My reaction too. What's the cheapest, non-sucky option anybody has used?
Ikea has motorized desks (sorry about the Swedish):

http://www.ikea.com/se/sv/catalog/products/90088946

About €450 (for the stand only).
Reminds me a bit of Ok Go's latest video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

Seems like something Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdRaf3-OEh4) would do. I think it is abstract, but I like it a whole lot nonetheless. It's creative and cute and whimsical.

Kudos!
I'd really really like to see an export API which exposes the document features and allows people to export differently/to different things.
+1
Yep.. Facebook doesn't own my 'real' inbox - Google does - and that's why I'll continue to use Google docs.

Yet another careless move by the Ballmer administration.
R is an ‘epic fail’ – or how to make statisticians mad
wow. talk about misleading.
Kurosawa worked with a team of writers, cinematographers, actors, assistants, producers. Seven Samurai was designed by committee -- Kurosawa just happened to have been at the head of that committee.

This is true for almost every film in existence. Certainly every widely distributed film.

This is also true for games. Some of the best games are driven by a single person -- think Kojima and Metal Gear or Miyamoto and Mario -- but they are the product of many, many talented artists working their asses off.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, in this case I decided to keep the "superflous" cat because it offers more flexibility/readability -- i.e., what if you want another command before the first sort? With the 2nd version you have to remove foo.txt and type your command, instead of just inserting "mycommand |" where needed (and what if mycommand doesn't accept a file, just stdin, then you need the cat anyway).

But it's a good point, and there's a balance between the absolute minimum and flexibility. At one extreme you have code golf, at the other you have an abstract FactoryFactory.
Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10
I disagree immensely - there's a certain mindset and culture that has contributed to the high-tech society that we see today. IMHO it is championed and built by people who care immensely about changing the world with their skills for the better, oftening making great personal sacrifices for their vision - this is a poor fit for someone who is demonstrated himself to be purely a gun-for-hire.

Phenomenally smart people spam people too, scam people also. Just because you're smart doesn't mean I want to work with you ;) There's a certain alignment of goals and values that has to happen, and I don't think that can work with the demographic you're talking about.
Ha! Brilliant. Is the stool comfy?
If you bought it in the last 30 days, you can return it...
I don't strike the keys with much force at all (I use the tiny apple keyboard).

It's because of my arms (and wrists) resting on the desk and transferring that force to the desk.
Yes, essentially what this is supposed to mean, is that the detector is (statistically speaking :) working.

Although B - or beauty - physics was the selling point at the time for the experiment, very few are deeply excited about it (SLAC BaBar did the same, and some CDF/D0 experiments). But perhaps the most intriguing was the beautiful Belle, from Japan. And don't forget, that ATLAS and CMS can do the same B physics also, being General Purpose detectors. So nobody is expecting great surprises, therefore people would rather focus on (very) rare decays, for which this detector is very well suited for, in hoping to find (another) thing not fitting the Standard Model (current holy grail, somewhat crippled anyway). All other GP detectors are "matroska"-like, trying to fish in a big soup of collision-events (many wonder about the event trigger on ATLAS, meaning how would they pick out interesting events from all the mess of the collisions...)

This detector is more like a fixed-target experiment detector (albeit working with colliding beams from the collider: actually the beams are defocused to generate less collisions, to have a "cleaner" picture). It is a "single arm spectrometer", used by those, who are leading experts in particle oscillations (B_0-s oscillate between states, useful for matter-antimatter studies). Antimatter and symmetry violations were proven with K oscillations; then around 1 TeV, B (particle) factories became "common place". And now, one might expect some particle oscillation at higher energies also, currently at 2x3.5 TeV, which is in the making...
Azeem, I think you highlight an important topic. I joined Wall Street after graduating as well, because 1. It paid well and was "a good job", and 2. Was one of the opportunities that came up to campus and was easy to interview for. Outside of investment banks and large consulting shops, there wasn't much else.

I think the lack of connectivity between college undergraduates and companies that would like to recruit them, but can't easily, is a large inefficiency and needs a solution (I feel so strongly about it, in fact, that I left finance and founded CollegeJobConnect a year ago and have been pushing it forward ever since to provide just such a service).

A startup can be a great place to learn and develop yourself, and when you are just entering the professional world you can take a few risks with your career more easily (no wife, no mortgage, etc.). However, a startup can also be a difficult environment, so any college student needs to do their research before jumping in.

All in all, I believe it will make you a professional weapon and give you the experience and "get it done" skills that you won't find in other roles, but might require a cash give-up in the short term comparatively (consider it an investment in yourself).
I debated the irony of having an essay on brevity that wasn't short. But, I realized my goal was to have (hopefully) several meaningful thoughts, vs. a single short one. These are basically the thoughts / fears that go through my head when I think about what brevity is and why it's resisted.

That said, brevity is always an asymptotic ideal we're aiming for.
"Google Docs vs MS Docs. Wondering why Google Docs still sucks?"

I assume because Google puts a lot of work in the api design.

Thats why it takes longer.
The disdain is from the nerds. Regular users will never complain about that.
Unfortunately they don't supply this to all countries where they operate.
I'd like to see hard numbers about this assertion
Why aren’t you contributing (To Python)?
An inner-tube accident as a teenager left Mr. McNutt with a bad back.

I wish they had elaborated a little more about this tantalizing nugget. Inner-tube rafting, blowout on a bike,... ?
Except if the public api of foo lib is only functions, which is the case for all clojure libs i've worked with.

EDIT: Ha, i just stumbled on this old yegge article, which is quite appropriate i think. With clojure APIs you think in verbs, so nouns are not that important

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

EDIT2 : perfect quote :

"In the remotest regions, beyond the Functional Kingdoms, lies a fabled realm called Lambda the Ultimate. In this place it is said that there are no nouns at all, only verbs!"

here you go ;)
Reading a British newspaper on a European topic is a bit like reading a American newspaper about Russia: not really the best way to understand.
I went to the microsoft docs site and didnt see an editor. You can edit docs via that website? If not, what is this guy comparing?
Diet Coke + Mentos
1) Yes, but I'm a plugged-in savvy Internet user, not a plumber or baker.

2) I think your customers -- less-than-net-savvy local businesses -- might not make the leap that you and I made automatically: "... and success at online marketing will bring you more customers and make you money."

3) I think you will find you spend a lot more time evangelizing Internet marketing to your customers than you spend evangelizing EggZack, which might be problematic for you. I think the core challenge is convincing them that this weird newfangled thing that they do on the Google with the webmails is actually going to make a difference in their bottom lines.
"After all, the connection between their conclusions and their funding is even stronger."

Citation? I'm really not aware of any pro-global-climate-change corporations paying people to issue opinions favorable to themselves. Perhaps you can point some out to me.
> This will help reduce the danger of using nonlethal weapons.

Alternatively, it'll teach people to over-rely on these things, much like some police departments have become overly reliant on tasers, with with bad consequences.
Agreed -- a recent blog post on HN (I can't seem to find it now) mentioned how an author had to turn a 500-page book into a 700-page one to make it seem "authoritative".

This thinking basically games our heuristics -- if all else is equal (which is never the case), then the longer book has more useful content. And given the way we're conditioned in school, a 20-page paper must be more valuable/important than a 5 page one.
That's a dangerous article for Mozilla to publish. You know, what with Chrome gaining ground and whatnot...
Would a time-delayed showing of the comments help?