skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an antitrust expert, but I've learned a little bit in the last decade+ when it first really grabbed my attention and I can't think of one example to support your theory that this action by Microsoft is "almost going out of their way to break cross-platform compatibility."

I suppose the stretch would be that if Facebook DID indeed become the de facto destination and portal for the overwhelming majority of internet users and "docs" was the only service available that some companies may be able to raise issue, but even then I am not convinced since you don't and won't NEED Facebook as your portal for the internet and to share productivity documents (and I'm putting on my future goggles here).

And keep in mind this is coming from someone who is not a fan of Microsoft, but greatly respects Bill Gates, and was a former employee of Apple.
It is just me? I cannot find any reason, or arguments stated in this article. Just an opinion.

My opinion is, Google Docs rocks because 1) extremely portable, a keyboard and a chair is all you need 2) sharing of documents make it very useful 3) can convert many different formats and export to PDF.

I have yet to find any reason to use anything else.
HN discussion of posting of same Wikipedia article from 92 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063287
Ask HN: Live CD virus scan?
Hi everyone. I was reading about the recent AV news and I was thinking about my ideal AV product.

A big problem (IMO) with AV software is they run inside a running OS. I've been reading about some of the clever things that some rootkit malware does to hide itself away and the AV has to compete on the field.

What I'd like instead is to be able to boot the machine with a live CD and have it check out the files on the hard disk before any malware gets to run and hide itself away. The software on the CD would have to download the latest AV signatures and start scanning the dormant files without anything getting in the way.

Does such a service exist?

Many thanks.
The frequent updates are security patches. You want them to be frequent and not to change things beyond the security issue.

There is a definite case for those to be a silent install though.
I think is a reflection of how switchers feel about Windows systems when they have to connect to those shared drives. Makes them feel good about their switch. And of course reinforces Mac users' bias against Windows. It's an emotional connection, better at least than an abstract disk image or a Microsoft logo.

It is no more smug than the envelope/stamp imagery used for email - it's not as if we email users look down upon those poor deluded souls who still cling to their snail mail. (do we?)
Your second statement should be reworded into a fact. It's also a lot easier to convince the people who have to configure the corporate firewall to open up port 80.
If Apple's strategy for building things requires strict secrecy, they must be prepared for occasional failures in that secrecy. This was simply an accident, bound to happen eventually. Apple can cope with it; otherwise, they wouldn't be using this strategy.

I find it amusing that Gizmodo is portrayed as the destroyer, here. They are creating value in their own way; it's a little ironic that the blogger bemoans the lack of builders after writing an entire article tearing down Gizmodo's work.

If Apple fans really wanted to be surprised when the new iPhone was unveiled, why did they read the Gizmodo article? Surely the readers are just as much to blame for the "destruction" of value as Gizmodo and Apple.
What about the dozen other customers who are calling you to complain about crappy service right now?
Publish their threatening letter on your blog. Gain the respect of your customers, and new potential customers of yours and theirs, by being the good guys and showing them to be the ones that resort to legal threats to discourage healthy competition.
They damaged the reputation of the guy who lost it. If Apple decided the breach was serious enough to warrant termination, how does that affect the hireability of somebody whose major claim to fame is "lost secret prototype while drinking and exposed company secrets to hailstorm of press?"

Why I'm annoyed at Gizmodo is the harping they did on this guy's personal life. Shortly after releasing the iPhone story, they then ran a story on the guy who lost it, including screenshots of his Twitter page. Then, for no apparently reasonable explanation, write another post with just the Twitter screenshot showing how it was his birthday.

What the hell, Jesus Diaz (main writer of all the iPhone-related posts)? Does the phrase "full disclosure" mean you have to be a dick, too? It seems like a pretty petty way of increasing pageviews, but suppose I shouldn't expect more integrity from a Gawker Media site.
Did they even consider the hundreds of people whose blood, sweat, and tears went into building that device?

Of course they didn't. Nor does anyone else. Apple anonymizes their engineering team for the most part. No more signatures on the inside of our Macs. The public knows Steve Jobs and Jon Ive and that's about it.

It's been clear for a long time that Apple would love to commoditize not just their internal engineering but their developer community as well. I say this impartially. It makes sense given their trajectory and control over the distribution channel.
The question now is how long it will take Adobe to get a Flash 10.2 beta out that will take advantage of this. As far as we know, this API is exactly what they've been asking for, so presumably they won't have to re-architect anything to be able to start using this API. I can't wait to see benchmarks of how much of a difference this makes.

On the other hand, if Adobe spends all summer making more excuses and not delivering acceptable performance on high-end hardware, we'll know that they have screwed themselves so thoroughly that Flash deserves to die.
Teaching Product Managers and Marketers how to Survive Agile Development
Aren't species boundaries pretty fuzzy when you start trying to look at them across time? A species is defined as a closed set of organisms which can breed with one another. I could breed with someone ten years older, they could breed with someone ten years older than them, and so on into the past until we have an unbroken chain of "could breed with" leading back to reptiles, amphibians, fish and invertebrates with whom I could most definitely not breed (and probably wouldn't want to). But there was no dividing line between "homo sapiens" and "something else" as we go up the chain; there couldn't possibly have been.

I get the impression that palaentologists define species by macroscopic features in the fossils, but that they are forced to do so in a fairly handwavey way, so any date when "homo sapiens" really first appeared is pretty arbitrary.
I've always been a fan of trying to organize my writing with several levels of complexity embedded. For example, when writing any sort of FAQ or explanation, I would briefly outline the steps, and then proceed to explain each one in further detail so that a lay audience may understand. This way both someone who's just looking to grasp or relearn an idea and someone who is very new to the topic can benefit. Either way, you're making assumptions about the level of minimum expertise of your audience.
I'm not sure about this, the only part I don't see happening anymore (at least, not as often) is printing. We still create and edit documents, then pass them along (email, IM, web, etc). Are you saying we'll have some completely new concept beyond documents?

That said, I still do see lots of printing. For example when we group together for discussions it is a whole lot easier to have a paper copy that I can doodle on, make notes, etc than to try and drag a laptop in (tablet or not).
OAuth 2: Too many compromises
A more practical advice than the original article. Thanks.
You don't play around with people that powerful.

He did get approximately $6 million in a settlement with the DOJ. Sounds like an explicit exoneration and a humiliating defeat for his transgressors, to me.
Ask HN: Science for the very young?
My son is just about to turn 5 and I am looking for "science experiments" or projects we can do together to help get him interested (and give me an excuse to do some of them).

Any suggestions, especially on a budget?
Sure - but it's a constantly running cycle, people seem to forget that. HTML 5 will get adopted given enough time - but by that point Flash will have moved on and will do more and do it better. Then HTML will catch up again... etc.

You can push HTML 5 and canvas all you'd like - but from a pure business standpoint if I can reach 98% of my audience with Flash, but only 40% with HTML5/Canvas I'd be an idiot to not choose Flash.

It will be WONDERFUL when I can use canvas to draw realtime graphs and know it will reach 98% of my users. That day is not today and it won't be for some time to come. Now, that being said I and doing exactly that task with canvas for a project - but it's as a backup of the Flash version since the client expects a sizable iPad/iPhone audience.
I can't believe that you select you browser based on the address bar. What about page loading speed, rendering and security?

Some of the awesome bar's functionality can be turned-off. For example:

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

could be set to zero.
It’s possible for body lice to have evolved from head lice in only a few generations, according to laboratory studies, Kitchen said. No evidence indicates that head lice can evolve from body lice.

This seems like an odd statement. Can anyone provide insight into what this means?
Ask HN: Considerations for open sourcing a startup's code?
I am a cofounder at a small startup (http://devver.net) that will be shutting down soon.

We hate to see our work completely disappear. We are currently looking for a company to purchase our code but we're also considering open-sourcing parts of our code base.

We have investors and we're aware that "giving away" the code they paid to develop will not be very enticing, but if we spend our own time to do the prep work (and if we can show that the process is low-risk), they may prefer that to the code simply disappearing.

Does anyone have experience open-sourcing a previously closed-source code base, especially in a startup? Any advice, considerations, success/horror stories, or ideas would be appreciated.
I have yet to find any reason to use anything else.

For lightweight text editing and easy document sharing, GDocs is perfectly adequate. For more serious document preparation (i.e. when you care what the output looks like), it still has a long way to go. The recent improvements are great, but I'm a little surprised Google haven't devoted more resources to it.
Poll: Should HN add the Facebook like button?
Now that Facebook has announced that keepers of any website can add a Facebook like button to the site, should Hacker News get in on that?

I'd love to hear your thoughts about how the FB like button fits on this site or on another site you like.
absolutely yes, that would be great for HN
no way, that's a crazy idea that would ruin HN
don't leave it sitting around in the bar where anyone can take it

Are you saying that you really believe that phone was left at the bar by Apple?

I don't care much about any loss of buzz for Apple, but the conditions in which that story was extorted are definitely not healthy and worth discussing.
I worry for the fan-boys. I really do.
The cynic in me sees these being used in crowd control---with occasional "mistakes".
Heh, thanks Greg. I may have not expressed it clearly, but when I say "compensation", I mean something that compels the talent you're hiring away from other industries. I think something like student loan subsidies could be very doable for a VC fund with hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. It sends a strong and serious signal IMO.

I think that's what it's really about, the messaging. It's just easier to market the names of a lot of these VC funds and the experience/track record/millions of $s that come with them, than it is to market their portfolio cos. It's a better hook; and on the other side of it all, venture funds SHOULD care about developing junior talent, and actively building the next generation of founders, entrepreneurs, etc etc. I just can't possibly imagine how any of this ends up being a bad thing.
This is a big milestone for LHCb - it's primary objective is the study of beauty physics, that is physics related to the beauty/bottom quark (that is what the "b" stands for in the name).
Yeah, I wasn't really critiquing so much as just pouring out my train of thought. As for 'how to get started', you could do a video, or probably even a well-worded description of what it is for would help... there is just zero instruction at the moment.

The description you gave above is actually pretty close to what you probably want on the homepage, but now that I've figured out what it is, I might just be 'intuiting' the answer from knowledge I already have.
The ways to stop procrastinating and get out of debt
As an ex (european) physicist, my experience is beauty/bottom have always been used interchangeably.
I think most people feel the same way, when people say they want flash to die I believe they are ok with playing webgames in flash. The most common frustration I have is browsing restaurant websites that use flash for their simple menus.

As a side note, I think there is also a subtle common UI pattern to abuse the hover feature on websites which is common in flash. It makes touch-based browsing more difficult and I wish web developers would avoid it. It isn't fair to blame flash for it though, javascript can do it too.
First they came for Hitler...  Youtube takes down Hitler parodies
What exactly would that add to the discussion? Nothing.

No.
> I can't wait to see benchmarks of how much of a difference this makes.

Some difference, but it's not the best thing ever, and not even the most important problem Flash has.

For one thing, the H.264 decoder in Flash is already faster than QuickTime's software decoder and competitive with FFmpeg, so video decoding is absolutely not the reason people think it takes too much CPU.
For the size of video you usually watch in a browser, drawing other elements on top of the video (and the necessary conversion to RGB) takes more CPU than actually decoding it (see http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different...). I don't know if they've improved that, maybe not - I guess the best solution would involve doing the whole thing in OpenGL which is tricky.

The other problem is that the browser plugin API is really old and doesn't match up with the double-buffered window system that OS X always used. This is supposedly better in Flash 10.1 and would improve it more than anything done here if so. Of course 10.1 isn't out yet, so who knows.
It's not clear whether this book really grapples with the problem of pseudonymity on the web. What happens when a single user can start multiple accounts--one for good behavior and the other for trolling? When the trolling account gets banned, can they just start another one?

There can be no 'reputation' without an answer to the problem of pseudonymity.
Obama’s Cooper Union Speech
The Most Important Thing for Improving Page Load Speed
For an article on brevity, I found this to be a bit to drawn out.

This is the next article I read, http://venturefizz.com/blog/how-pitch-investor-90-seconds
and in comparison, this is a great example of brevity.

It's punch, quick, and gets to the point.
I have no doubt the information was leaked to him, he usually marks speculative predictions as such. What I'm wondering is if the leak was sanctioned or not.
Another Case Against Gizmodo
Sharepoint and Outlook web access have a significantly degraded user experience on anything but Internet Explorer running on Windows (client.) Full outlook web access isn't even supported.

The fact that Microsoft is building their new platform on top of these technologies is troubling.
Hotmail's social networking busts your privacy
flash will eventually go the way of java applets. modern browsers will be able to do 99% of what you need to do and for that remaining 1%, you'll have this clunky web browser plugin that you probably have disabled by default for security reasons, that you'll decide not to turn on to view the particular website and just hit the back button or let the blue square icon sit there.

browsers can now natively play video, play audio, find your location, store offline data, and do direct socket operations. i can't imagine a webcam api being too far off, enabling a flash-free chatroulette (that's all we really care about anyway, amirite?)
"If nuclear launch codes were left in a bar, the media would be congratulated for breaking the story."

Well, not if they scanned the launch codes and posted them online for everyone to see. That's not the only fallacy either--the government losing nuclear launch codes in a bar is a story because it proves the government can't protect nuclear launch codes, Apple losing a prototype iPhone in a bar is only a story because it gives us some idea of what the next iPhone might look like.

Incidentally, paying thousands of dollars for something you damn well know isn't legally owned by the person who's selling it to you is wrong. If it's a book of nuclear launch codes and there's a legitimate story to be told it's outweighed by a greater good, but where's the greater good here?
Nah. It depends on what kind of career you want to go into, but the very best time to get into a startup is straight out of school. You don't have a family, or a house, or any of the other baggage that necessitates a steady paycheck and solid job security.

What kind of opportunities do you think you're passing up? If Google or Apple or Microsoft want you, you can always go back and reapply after your start up experience. Interesting doors open all the time.

My first 4 jobs were with startups, my career is fine, even though almost no one has ever heard of the tiny awesome companies I helped to build. I have little kids that need me around, so I found a steadier job in more established organization (which took exactly one resume, and one interview), but I plan on going back into the start up world when they're older.
Funny you say that, I actually left that place largely for this reason directly for a very small startup.
Apple's not just selling a phone, it's the entire lifecycle experience

You know what, if this makes you want to buy Apple stuff, it's really frickin' sad ...
"They posted a video on YouTube with a smug smile on their face as they unveiled the iPhone a couple of months before Steve Jobs could. They stole his thunder. They rained on his parade. They spoiled his secret."

The poor man... I mean, it's not like he'll ever be able to a product reveal again, is it?
</sarcasm>

Serious, I'm not going to argue that Gizmodo should have done what they did, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for Steve Jobs missing out on the opportunity to present yet another product to world in a massively self-glorifying fashion, with thousands of fans singing his praises. He does it every few years; he can miss one.
The Internet of cars: A road system designed around cooperative technology
It would also help if they prompted for permission at the end of users' sessions, not at the start. No relaunch necessary and users don't have to wait for an update to install before they can start browsing.
Thanks, I know how to do that too. Actually I do a lot of reading on a browser with javascript and images off (Konqueror has a convenient 'load images' button, but CSS still sneaks in an occasional annoyance).

Firefox without Flash does OK for me now, for the rest of the stuff that needs javascript and images. I doubt it will be possible to tune it properly (short of hosts file munging) if all Flash migrates to HTML5.

And of course it's a bit unwieldy to keep multiple browsers around - Konqueror 3.x also shows me a convenient 'open link in Firefox' option, but that's it. And I don't think this kind of fiddly options will be exactly first priority.

We'll see in a couple of years, I guess.

P.S.

The 'canvas' animation in the page linked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252899 pegs one core of my Linux machine with Firefox 3.5.

I just tested, and it does the same with image loading turned off. Must also turn off javascript to make it stop (duh, must be a js busy-wait doing it).

(I seem to recall a line about 'depending on the kindness of strangers', not really an enviable situation.)
Microsoft already bought a chunk of Facebook—$240 million worth back in 2007. That purchase gave Facebook an implied valuation of $15 billion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/technology/24cnd-facebook....
In some areas this might work, but I'm not sure it's a good idea in general. That sort of thing plays well among tech-geek audiences, but I think not among more general audiences, who will be distracted at best, or scared off at worst.
NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images
And if you use a Type-1 hypervisor (i.e. one that runs on the bar metal) you should be even safer.
Here's why Raphael.js and SVG totally rock.
Jamie Martin: "I just wanted to add that I have no hard feelings for Bootup Labs, for Danny, Boris, or anybody we met, I don’t think it’s anything intentional they did. But there are lessons to be learned from what happened from our situation."

Funny and sad that the commenter lynch mob has a lot more righteous anger -- "Screw them" -- than the people actually involved.
Marketing is necessary to a degree, and insofar as marketing gets potential consumers knowledge of devices they may want, it's important that marketing happen.

But what this blog is essentially saying is that Gizmodo ruined Apple's hard work of marketing the phone by publishing pictures of the phone. That's absurd. If publishing pictures of a device in a neutral manner depresses a device's reputation, that device is not as reputable as its marketers would have you believe, and their work should be torn down.
You can abbreviate the title.

"Social Networking Busts Your Privacy" (by definition of the phrase "social networking").
This is also a big win for Windows users since the SSH setup procedure is complicated and error-prone on that platform. Once Windows tools start supporting Smart HTTP, the barrier to start using Git on Windows will be much reduced.
Good post. I'm looking forward to seeing the follow-up post with data from your site
WOW!, that is VERY cool.
It just goes to show that the most important thing is know your audience.

However (and this is just a suggestion), now that you have this new version, and I suspect the old version, maybe you could do a side by side comparison to see how your targets actually interact with the different designs.

It's entirely possible that your subjects ask for one thing, when they really prefer another.

http://noisebetweenstations.com/personal/weblogs/?p=1742
Security is overrated.