skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Beck and Palin are the inevitable outcome of that devolution. They are what we deserve. They are, in fact, what we've created."

Right. Would Fr. Coughlin have got where he did without the Internet deluge? Or William Jennings Bryan or William Duane? What half-ass posturing. Demagoguery does not and never has depended on the existence of a technology, though various technologies have given and advantage to one or another style of demagoguery.

Newsweek should know better than to publish this--or perhaps print has rotted their wits.
Designing f8 — Part 1 of 5 — Overall Concept & Direction
I've used contests to generate content. Give some type of reward for participation, randomly selecting X winners. As long as you find the right balance between potential prize and work required you'll get the desired effect. If your site has any type of rating system for the content, those ratings could be used as a multiple for contest entries. Just try to make sure people aren't gaming the system to increase their own ratings.

With that said, in my experience the problem is that the vast majority of people that visit for the contest will not visit for the content. That will be your next challenge.
The excerpts were Fortune's exclusive because they got to print them first and TechCrunch to post later, marking Fortune as the originators of the scoop.
1) They've mentioned maybe using XMPP, which is federated and seems to work ok.

2) It's worse than that, search for John Smith on facebook and the top result will be the one in your social circle. So a central directory would have to know the social graph. However, sending search queries to your existing friends, by whatever method you use for updates, and forwarding them a couple hops might work nicely. No idea what they're thinking on this.

3) I thought I saw something about them using public-key crypto, and assumed they would be encrypting their posts with each friend's public key. Performance might be an issue, since they would have to re-encrypt for each friend, so maybe they are thinking to share a secret key with all friends.

It's true that you're trusting the host with your privacy that way, but instead of one big host that everybody has to trust, there are lots of hosts that compete with each other for people's trust. And there's no one place for marketers or other goons to find all the information on everybody.
Ripped off by oDesk
It's all x264 encoded now afaik. (can't really check from the UK)
What I don't understand about Diaspora is why can't one guy just start hacking out his own "distributed Facebook" replacement today. No team needed (not at start.) No money needed. Use F/OS/OTS software, all the pieces are just laying there. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if there were already several people out there doing exactly this already, but without the PR splash made by Diaspora.

Ok, maybe I've just answered my own question. It's only about the PR splash!
could, perhaps, maybe

This is the problem; who is starting/making this paradigm shift? And can they cause such a shift to remove the bias towards entertainment and information overload.

Sure, there are lots of examples (Iran for example) of the utility of modern media. But currently the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad - and getting worse.

That, I think, is the point.
> I can't speak to CA, but in NV much of what the teachers union has done within the school district simply can't be talked about due to confidentiality clauses and other employee protection laws/regulations not to mention those about protecting the identity and privacy of minors.

That may be (or not), but we're talking about political activity in the open, which has little/no relationship with protecting teachers against administrative sanctions wrt false accusations of child abuse.

"Administrative sanctions" is key - criminal accusations ARE public.

> I can tell you that if it weren't for the legal protection offered by the union many good teachers would be out of jobs, and many others would never have become teachers as these services are often not affordable on an individual basis.

Interestingly enough, teachers aren't the only people accused of such activities. And when other people are so accused, it's public.
Tablets: The Scramble to Be Second
Good. Mozilla needs a kick in the balls to realize how much Firefox 4 really needs to undo the reputation that Firefox 3.x has gotten.
I also learned C at that age, but I was excited about it. My motivation was thorough disgust at the limitations of QBasic and VB, which a friend and I had been running into in our more ambitious video game projects.
Actually you guys are probably right. I should clarify that I am in my mid 30s. When I was a kid computers were still mostly for nerds. There was no broadband internet. It was kind of a pain in the ass to program anything other than BASIC. If you wanted to use another language chances are you had to buy the compiler. Thus, it's not 100% unusual that I have peers who didn't program until college. Especially guys from countries where it was really hard and expensive to buy a computer in the 80s.

Now that everyone has had a computer and serious internet since about age 8 it would actually be pretty weird if they hadn't tried programming at all before college.
Ooops - looks like somebody forgot to put "TRUNCATE" in the list!
Gödel's theorem in particular lends itself to this sort of thing. For more mathematical schadenfreude, I like Franzen's "An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse" http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide-Abuse/...

Hackers will be interested especially in the rather weak attempts to use Gödel to make all sorts of silly inferences about artificial intelligence and the nature of mind.

Probably no scientific result of the 20th centry, except maybe the theory of relativity, has been used by so many to prove so much while understanding so little.
Damn I read the article about Dropbox's system and it didn't even occur to me to make a service out of it. Nice job.
Leave of absence I'd say. 3months may be enough to build the basic infrastructure before turning it over to the open source community, but the odds of Diaspora succeeding in the long run will be significantly better if its guided by the people who created and live it as long as possible. Thinking of Linux as the model.
Regarding John Nack on Apple’s Control Over Native iPhone OS Software
Unless I totally misunderstand how this site works, then the story is on the first page because a bunch of people voted for it. That's the idea, to expose stories people might be interested in. One thing you _can't_ say here is that no one is interested in the topic.

If you don't want to read "another damn Apple story" then _don't click on the link_...
Please don't pay for PDAnet when there is TetherBot which is free and has more or less the same functionality.

Also, WIFI Tether and CM's built in USB Tethering are better than either SOCKS proxy method.
Delay actually sending a email by a few minutes so you have a chance to go back and edit it or 'unsend' if you need to. (And have a method to force it to send immediately if you're sure you won't want to edit it).
no plans, just dreams, at the moment.
Those are good arguments why "pull --rebase" is not a default action, thank you. Now I don't understand why either "pull" or "pull --rebase" is supposed to have any different behaviour when somebody does it! As far as I undestand git has enough information not to complain more in one case and less in another, and as far as I understood, the main argument of the main article was that "--rebase" somehow "eases some pain"!? How come?
Facebook and Apple Should Both Be Scared
Already exists, look in your 'labs' tab on the settings page.
Great idea and easy to implement too. Thanks.
I've told Max in the past that he has an open invitation to Mixergy. He's not ready.

(When I first asked Patio11 for an interview, he asked me to wait too.)
I got burned by providers in oDesk and oDesk siding with the (rather unprofessional) provider. Did a search and it looks like there is a rash of people like me.

Any experiences on how to manage things more tightly?

I was able to cut the bleeding early, but it could have been 5 times more if I were a bit more forgiving, sadly.
And here I am thinking it was odd that my bank has a non-EV SSL cert.
Git rebase: keeping your branches current
OK, so one of my major, major gripes about the current trends in modern web developments is putting stuff in videos. This is over 8 minutes long, and I'm sure it's fascinating, but I could probably skim a transcript in 15 seconds to decide if it's worth my time.

If it is, then I could read a transcript in 60 seconds, possibly less. Then I could re-read the important bits, print them out and put them on my wall to catch my eye at odd moments for the next two weeks.

But no, I have to sit through a video. I've got no idea whether it's worthwhile, no summary, no abstract, no method to skim.

And no time.

And I took this time because you, the Hacker News audience, can benefit from knowing this. Some of your audience won't take the time to sit through a flashy video, wonderful graphics, or clever animations.

Some of your audience have limited time, limited attention, and want to hear your message clearly, quickly, and effectively, or not at all.

Video isn't always the right medium. Write this on your wall - provide a summary.

</rant>
Wow, I didn't see any of those terms implied in the article. Sweaty palms, heightened cortisol -- sure. The title is plain misleading.
Also, was just reading up on this more. But look at Salazar's history ('In 2006, Salazar voted to end protections that limit offshore oil drilling in Florida's Gulf Coast.')

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Salazar

Clearly, he is not qualified to head this effort.

Via:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/10/focusing-spill

Nor are other people at the table, e.g., Jim Jones (formerly on the board of Chevron).

Anyway, I love Obama. But I predict this becomes a classic case of not taking control of the situation coming back to bite him in the long run politically, and more importantly the environment...
That's excellent advice.

Being weak in algorithms means that the author wouldn't be able to get in the door at amazon (which loves its juniors), but IMO that's a good thing, because I'd never want to work with someone who learned how to develop "production" software at amazon. (It was some of the worst code I'd ever seen -- and I went to amazon after over six years of government contractor work.)
A crowd of mostly young or hungry entrepreneurial hackers who could clone his software and/or enter the same niche markets, perhaps taking only a few good sprints to do it, as well. I can definitely see why someone might be scared of this crowd.
If you haven't already noticed, early-adopting geeks drive adoption to the masses. They are an important part of the vetting process.

If you piss off that same crowd, sooner or later the ripple will be felt. Depending on the order of magnitude, it could very well turn into a tidal wave as it gains speed. Makes you wonder if hockey stick inversion is possible. I think so, but I also think Facebook is smart enough to avoid it. Regardless of this privacy issue, it's still a phenomenal product.
Autorules.

If I sign up for a new service or website or whatever, I often get a slew of mail messages. I can easily label these or move them to a folder, but I frequently forget to create a rule to label them automatically.

So if I get 3 mails from a new source, highlight them all and label them as (something), I wish gmail would ask me if I want to treat all mail from xxx that way in future.
Study - CEOs distinguished by "competent-looking" faces
> Not quite. The law enumerates the things that are automatically work for hire. Works outside those must be explicitly declared works for hire in the contract.

The article specifically says that this is not correct: "A work made for hire is not any work that you pay someone to create for you. Nor is it any work that you and a developer agree is a work made for hire.".

Per TFA (quoting the law) it has to be (1) done by an employee, or (2) both in the list of 9 kinds of things (which does not include software) and specifically declared to be a work for hire. Things that are not in the list and are not done by employees cannot be works for hire regardless of what the contract tries to claim.
Thanks for the reply. Before joining MS in March, I was building web apps just like most of the commenters here and I'd like to try to get feedback to the IE team if I can to make that app development easier.

The IE9 Platform Preview 2 has gotten positive reviews and it seems like the team is listening so I think it makes sense to keep talking and asking.
unfortunately porn is banned in app store, so no, he can't be
Eventually the platform will develop and mature, and perhaps in five years time or so, it might be powerful enough to replace a traditional computer for most people.

The frustrating thing is that it is powerful enough to be a computer for most people, but for non-technical reasons, Apple insists on keeping it Not A Computer.
Ya i have that enabled, but it only works for a few seconds. Also if I click another link after clicking send (which I usually do, I usually go to inbox) I lose the chance to edit it. I think it would be useful to have the ability to edit the email for a few minutes after you send most times I don't realize immediately there is a change I want to make, but I usually do realize it within 2 minutes.
"Agreed - in fact I'd say out of the best programmers I've worked with almost all had CS degree's."

It goes to show that there's no correlation between programming skill and degree. Most of the worst programmers I've ever worked with had CS degrees, because they tended to write the most pointlessly complicated code they could. They were invariably the most guilty of premature optimization, and rarely produced code that worked any better than my minimal implementations did -- and of course, no one could ever prove that their implementations actually worked, because they were incomprehensible.
Isn't Mr Obama on a Blackberry in half the candid shots we see of him?
I believe it's a 5 or 10 second delay
for that labs feature. Something more similar to commenting on HN might be interesting. Allowing someone to edit/delete for up to several minutes before the email is officially sent..
Copyright is reserved unless explicitly given. That is, what you have said may be perfectly true, and Arrington could still be in the wrong. All they have to have done is to not give him explicit permission.
He's writing for Macworld.com. He didn't ask to get posted here. What do you want him to do?
It's true, here's a more accurate statement: In my opinion, hard evidence of the utility of my product outweighs hard evidence, if any, of the utility of (at least) his brand of religion.

As to the fact that his belief drives him to stand on the street corner and yell at strangers, that is what I am admiring. I can't comment to his motivations, but I didn't mean to cast aspersions on his enthusiasm with that sentence. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Gold vending machine
Clicking the back and forward buttons in Chrome 5 beta doesn't work.
it shouldn't be that hard to figure out, right? there's only 200000 apps...
Actually, it probably does mean you're worse off in terms of ability -- but not in terms of potential or aptitude.

5 years ago I used to think I had the coding thing down pretty pat -- now I'm much better than I was then, and I have a lower opinion of my knowledge as well :)
Fair enough! I've just gotten used to seeing the Undo link in gmail...but I've never actually had to use it.
I think people are overly poopooing the iPad's effect on the world. I think people who buy them INSTEAD of a computer for anyone born since 1950 is being a moron. However I think 99% of people who use them view them as a device slightly more mobile as a laptop which is nice for certain activities, and is a nice auxiliary.

I know I personally have used it to answer quite a few emails (but then again, if I was buying it for just personal use, I likely wouldn't have; I'm a professional iPad dev), as well as keep up on rss feeds and used it as a pdf reader.
On the one hand, yes, he has a valid point, but I'd guess the downvotes are from people who feel that being unclear in your communication, then calling repeatedly over and over to have you take down a post full of glowing praise and preorder links on a hugely popular blog, then, when you refuse to edit what is probably the best PR the book's had so far, threatening to sue you to have you take it down.

Fortune could have said 'Sorry, we miscommunicated, could you trim down your excerpts? Here are some example quotes you might want to include instead.' They could have called him, and when they didn't get an answer, e-mailed him instead. They could have asked nicely, or even looked on the bright side of this amazing PR. Instead, they're being the biggest assholes they can be.

So yeah, there's a point to be made there, but I think Fortune's dickery is overshadowing it.
They asked if he would publish excerpts.

Except they didn't, at least not in any publicly-posted email that I can see. In fact, they describe the excerpt as "exclusive" to Fortune -- they asked Arrington to post "on the book excerpts", not "to post the book excerpts". As I said, a miscommunication -- and there is a simple, mature way to handle that.
This film was talked about as a prime Oscar candidate for months before the Oscars.

They really can't get distribution for an Oscar film? I doubt that. I think they just miscalculated the timing.

Or they could have sold DVDs before the Oscars. People would have bought them once they won.
That's the point. He won't even know if or how many sales he makes. Yet, he perseveres. Don't like what he's selling but props to his enthusiasm.
"If you want to make money, why would you post anything and risk killing the golden goose?"

"If you want to share your wisdom or experience, why do so in a vague, watered down fashion?"

Seems to me that your two questions here almost answer each other.
We list all TEDx events at http://www.ted.com/pages/view?id=348
But I see what you mean about auto-notification. If you could sign up with an account for TED.com, input your current location, and automatically receive updates from nearby TEDx events, would you use it?
Yes, and maybe television will be used to bring education and culture to the masses.
This readin' and writin' business is turning us into helpless idiots.

I mean what will become of our natural memory if all we have to do is write stuff down and read it later on. When I was kid you memorized what was important. And we were _strong_!!!

Then there's the effect on personal communication. What ever became of traveling days and weeks to go talk to someone else far away. We miss all that travel and and seeing what the world is like. (Not to mention the effect on the travel industry.) A written letter just doesn't have the same effect on someone as a face to face visit. And besides, if its in writing, how am I gonna wiggle out of terms and conditions I don't like?

I tell you, I don't like it.

And don't get me started on that damn printin' press...

edit:

Seriously (huuuur hur hur hur) people aren't getting stupider.

There've _always_ been stupid people in great numbers. Never been a shortage. Its just that its easier to see them or have to deal with them. Anyone can post a blog or get hits on youtube. That's a good thing. The problem isn't too much information technology, its too little filter and editorial technology. It'll happen. We're, what, 15, 20 years into this internet thingie. 40 years if you're generous. It took over a hundred years for the printing press to stabilize technologically and several hundred years for people to learn to deal with its societal implications (actually we're still working on that one...) Sites like this (hacker news) are just the beginning.

In the meantime, I've started doing a little grassroots filtering by no longer reading Newsweek technology articles...
I agree; to me, the email says that the post would be about the excerpts, and the excerpts themselves were provided simply because they weren't live on the Fortune site yet. The email quotes in the post do NOT say he is going to post the excerpts. In fact, referring to Fortune's "exclusive excerpts" clearly implies that they'll only be available on Fortune's site, i.e., not on Techcrunch.

He simply misread the emails. With the benefit of hindsight, he should see that they don't confirm his side of the story, which makes the blog post seem... weird. (Usually when you read just one guy's side of an issue, you don't come out of it thinking he's probably wrong.) At best, they're ambiguous. I think the natural reading favors Fortune, and I would say that if they're the best evidence he has, and he posted the excerpts based on these emails, then he's clearly wrong. But maybe he was misled by other communication.
A lack of quality control certainly didn't help.
I wonder if it's a similar problem that is seen in Australia. Plenty of talented folks, but a real lack of innovation/big thinking. There are two main problems in Australia.

1. Lack of capital. Larger Australian companies and investors don't "get" the value and potential of startups, and there isn't a strong network of angels. I'm also shocked at some of the valuations I've seen in Australia for companies that end of raising a lot more overseas. A company that may be valued at 100k in Australia would be valued at 3 million in Silicon Valley.

2. Lack of gumption. There is this very odd cultural thing called "Tall Poppy Syndrome" in Australia, which is essentially that everyone should know there place - if you rise too high you'll get cut down. People aren't encouraged to think big.
To websites that modify the clipboard behind my back: Please stop it.
Truly the father (mother?) of all life!
That sucks. This is a could be a huge blow to oDesk. If oDesk can't guarantee, they should be put to shame for assuring users and using that language on their websites or documentations.

Finding reputable/trustworthy offshore development is very difficult. oDesk is suppose to minimize that risk, no?
The challenge is that I don't think the general public understand and care as much as the tech community cares.

If as a tech person, you care enough about these issues, what do you do about it?
Are you able to steer your friends toward alternatives?
How do we make it clear to the non-tech savvy what these issues really are, and how they are affected.

When looking at the app store, most people (I think) feel that they shouldn't care if apple has a closed ecosystem, because that closed ecosystem has 200k+ apps while the more open android and blackberry have less about 1/4 that amount.

With respect to Facebook, even though I understand the implications of Facebook's privacy policies, I'm damned if I can think of a situation where it would really be used against me (maybe I'm just not evil enough). But I know I don't like their policies.

We need more than just 'alternatives', we need alternatives that are better than these in multiple areas.
I have a cash-cow side project that makes more money than many would expect. It'd also be trivially easy to duplicate and is simple enough that there'd be barely any value to HNers to hear the details. I'm confident talking crap about that field but wouldn't be overly keen to submit to HN questioning. Could well be that maxklein is in a similar position.
It would be absolutely lovely if you would force-install IE9 alongside lower versions, and use IE9's rendering engine from lower versions if a special meta tag would be present in the webpage.
That way you get all the backwards compatibility anybody will ever want, and we can finally forget about IE6&7(&8). Cheers!