skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't consider copying a single menu bar as it is used on Macs since 1984 as an innovation. I detested the single menu bar on my Mac classic and I always thought the Windows way were preferable -- back then I was a Mac user. And I always found the arguments that Mac zealots put forwards in favour of the single menu bar, were ridiculous. And this post reminds me much to much of the justifications of back then. Those arguments were ridiculous in the 1990s and they still are in the 2010s.

If they thought the menu bar takes too much space, they whould work on minimizing it while it's not in use. But they shouldn't dislocate it from the window to which it belongs.
My point was not that using alternate codecs was technically impossible, but that it was de facto infeasible — nobody does it (because you'd only want to use it if you already wanted to use a free codec for it's freedom), as such nobody tests against it, so it won't be well supported by implementations, not even to necessarily give you a 'codec not found' error message.

You're right that OGG and native Flac are different containers, with differently stupid approaches (aiming too high and too low, respectively). The later Flac formats do specify OGG's broken metadata system, one of several reasons that nobody ever distributes Flac files with any internal metadata. I've never seen a Flac-in-OGG file in the wild, but I imagine that seeking is at least as broken there.

Seeking in Quicktime works just fine for all manner of esoteric codecs and containers — the problem is with the FOSS stuff where they decided that they'd do something inventive, and ended up with something pointlessly different — enough to make it annoying to integrate into any existing system — and no better than what everyone else does.

Sometimes what scratches your own itch and is fun to implement is no good for anyone else to actually use.
Isn't is a four man show now (him + GF + 2 employees)?
Seems like a different site than Mechanical Turk. I go to MT to fulfill a need. Fiverr seems like a place I'd go to if I had money to burn on something random.
just what is it with blogs and gray-on-white text these days? what's wrong with real black on real white? does everyone have a miscalibrated super-glossy-glare highdef screen or what?
That's actually really interesting, your line about not being "one of us." If you read my response to another comment below, that urge was never there for me. Going out on my own was a reasoned decision based on false assumptions and incomplete evidence about what would give me satisfaction. It wasn't a passion. It wasn't a drive. It wasn't a hunger or the thrill of the hunt.

I just didn't like my job.

My opinion is that none of my assumptions were uncommon ones and that the evidence I had at the time is also pretty typical, so my situation is a relatively common one (or will be as more people come to where I am now).

I think you've hit on something important about it being hardwired into your personality. That might be a good reality check for people just starting out. Have you been entrepreneurial your whole life? Do you have the necessary drive? What are your priorities? etc.

Instead, it often gets framed around intelligence, willpower, courage, and a lot of other stuff that no self-respecting person would readily admit not having. It almost shames you into sticking with it.

It would have been helpful early on if I'd encountered more warnings along the way that were genuine in encouraging me to consider quitting. I know that some commenters just fired up their caps-lock at the mere mention of quitting, but hear me out.

Some people think this stuff is for them, but it's not really. Getting smart and clear about where that distinction can be made and helping people figure it out sooner is good for everyone. It gives the bad-fit types (like me) a good clue to look elsewhere, and it gives the good-fit types (like you) a renewed sense of confidence despite discouragements and failure.
Just do both.

Being an entrepreneur and employee do not have to be mutually exclusive. You can simply work on creating prototypes of new product ideas in your free time.

If I had a buddy doing that, I would still love talking with him to pick his brain.
I've met Rasmus once, when he generously spoke at our humble community college during his tenure at Yahoo. He came across as pragmatic and opinionated. In his writings and presentations he always stresses simplicity and efficiency (two virtues often lost in the quest for novelty and elegance), and he conspicuously disdains excess. Check out his 2008 DrupalCon presentation and you will see that he is a straight shooter who does not curry favor or spare the ignorant.
Often, lawyers help keep someone from being against you. In contact law, lawyers are there to make keep a dispute from happening. A good lawyer will be able to foresee a potential problem and make sure you negotiate it's outcome before you enter into a deal.
If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs tell them no.
This blog post is worthless shit.

Edit: let me clarify. This blog post is written by an infantile, narcissistic know-it-all and exudes the odor of vomit and feces. The fact that it appears here lowers my esteem of HN and further confirms my suspicion that the community is full of daft fight club-wannabe group-thinkers. Fuck you very much.
The problem with that is that the ratings are a public good. Public goods have some counter-intuitive properties. Investors would have every incentive to individually contribute as little to the pool as possible as long as action happened. Economic theory says that one of four things is likely to happen. Those are:

1. The knowledge is worthwhile to a small group (often just one) of investors, who fund it. The memorable phrase for this is "the exploitation of the large by the small." (A practical example of this is OPEC and high oil prices. The complicated negotiations OPEC engages in illustrate the desire of members of the group to contribute as little as possible to provisioning the public good.)

2. An organization exists that investors belong to for some other reason which funds the ratings. (A practical example of this how people belong to AAA for membership benefits, but then AAA lobbies for road improvements.)

3. A coercive organization intervenes and forces the matter. (Virtually all government regulations fall into this category.)

4. The public good is not provisioned. (What happened to investors who wanted trustworthy ratings.)

Read The Logic of Collective Action for the classic introduction to this topic.
Lack of competition will kill Apple, so even if you love OSX, you'd better don't wish that.
More reasons to hate Google Contacts
Was there an answer somewhere on the page?
I am still waiting for the metaverse
Facebook Sends Window Decals to Local Businesses
If you read "Rework", you'll come away with the impression that blindly mimicking the competition because "you have to catch up" is precisely not the 37signals way. I do not believe they need to be making inflated claims.
Instead, the Hatfields and the McCoys just kill each others sons for a couple dozen years.

The problems are human nature. Lawyering is often childish, uncivilized and brutish, but we are making progress.
Because it's weird in ways that provide no real benefit except towards the gratification of the designer for having done something novel, and uses those novelties as an excuse to willfully leave out the data that's normally used for that.

You do need to understand it to implement it correctly (or rather, as correctly as its design will allow you to), but there's a naive implementation right within grasp — so the people implementing it in a larger playback system will do that because they already have full support for everything else and aren't about to refactor everything for your fanciful shit. They just want to tick a checkbox on a feature list that their real users don't really care about.
Honestly, yes.

Sometimes I look down on them, but sometimes I'm not. This is also the case for most entrepreneurs. Of course, an entrepreneur won't look down on his/her own employees.

The only factor that influences my view is what kind of employment the resigned entrepreneur is switching to. If it's a great job, then I would respect him/her.

It's a false perception to compare entrepreneur to employee. We should compare "What are we contributing to the society?", instead of merely "How do we contribute to the society?".
Firefox Wants to Be Your Online Identity Portal Too
Actually the facebook login case was one of people using computers using a limited skillset(ie using search bar for everything), not necessarily being stupid. Well, that plus being impatient.

I wanted to write a longer reply, but this article covers it pretty well: http://www.osnews.com/story/22884/The_Facebook_Login_Thing_B...

On a personal note: my mother in law used to only use browsers history (down arrow) to access her sites. Since she only uses about 10 sites this worked very well for her.
One day, she was very upset, when my browsing on her computer "broke" her computer.
She is not stupid, and once I showed her how to set up shortcuts on toolbar, her computer was "fixed".
Would you include Haskell in?
Still broken for me as well.
JSON-RPC: a tale of interfaces (blog.golang.org)
Along the same lines, from 2007:

Zapping Trash With Plasma Produces Clean Energy and Fuel
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/garbage_plasma.php
If you click the little blue arrow in the top-right corner of an individual message, there is a "Filter messages like this" option. It has been there for quite some time. Also, marking a message as read is "<shift> + i".
#8: Ugly, unfriendly, unlovable user interface

To be fair, I sync through nuevasync and have no problems. A lot of people say "why bother" but really, they do a fine job ironing out some of the kinks. Also, Akonadi syncing on KDE seems to mostly work.
The caution behind that corollary is: be aware of the difference between infeasible, impossible, and laziness.

There's a whole big market out there for people who can execute the full 100% while everyone else stops after the easy 90. Case in point: Apple.
Linux Hater: A year later (offensive language)
Rating agencies seem like an absurd idea altogether. Have they never heard of the perils of having a single point of failure? Much less a single point of failure that's a government-created oligopoly? Yikes.

It seems that businesses are just running on an outdated model developed when information sharing was a lot harder, so only condensed forms like quarterly reports and press releases were feasible. But now that information sharing is a lot easier, shareholders should be demanding more openness from businesses -- yes, today a lot of that information is considered to be a trade secret, but at the same time shareholders need to stop allowing businesses to get away with what's equivalent to deceit through "creative" accounting (e.g. apportioning profits/debts amongst subsidiaries). That's just a textbook example of exploiting information asymmetry. Shareholders should expect more information about the business' books and transactions. There must be some natural equilibrium between being open about transactions and protecting strategic advantages, but right now we have the functional equivalent to price fixing, er, information fixing -- companies don't release relevant information because "no other company does" and shareholders don't expect real operating information either because that's not part of the status quo.

Wouldn't an investment bank that was so confident in the principles behind its analysis that it was willing to list all its transactions in a continuously-updated XML file, despite the risk of copy-cats, seem like a pretty damn good investment? They wouldn't have to divulge their proprietary methods of analysis, just make their holdings public. This would greatly improve the efficiency of markets as investors could use their own proprietary methods to estimate the risk of an entity's portfolio management strategy when deciding whether to invest in it.

And there's definitely historical precedent for this -- the fabled value investor Benjamin Graham didn't go to great lengths to hide his trades, instead he'd use them as examples in his classes, and yeah, people copied him. And he still made boatloads of money.
I'm not sure about the MT analogy, but it is Fiverr is a neat concept. Hopefully you can keep the spam down and signal-to-noise ratio up. Also keep improving the reputation system, perhaps with some stats and percentages and filtering and sorting. Would like to be able to favorite people as well (or maybe you can already and I didn't notice the feature).
What’s More Compromising Than Money?
The Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility to address fundamental questions of ethics and fairness when it declined to review the case of Charles Dean Hood, an inmate on death row in Texas.
Isn't it difficult for a translator to work just based on text? I took a look at the job posting api and could only see space for a block of text.

When I wanted strings in my app to be translated, I included screenshots so that the translator would understand the context. Otherwise it might be impossible to guess what a very small string is supposed to represent.

For a while I was working as a manga translator, and in that case it would have been doubly important to see more context. Actually it probably wouldn't even work to split a translation task for multiple translators, since each might decide to translate something inconsistently. For example speaking style, naming of things etc.

This will probably work best for longer pieces of text like business text where you can easily guess the meaning without seeing any context and where you don't need to make decisions that might affect text that comes a hundred pages later.

This is a very interesting startup, if you want more gyoza distractions I'll be travelling in Tokyo until 3rd of May.
It's nothing like MT, but it's a fun site. A friend of a friend contracted someone on fiverr to design a logo for a project he was working on. I saw the logo the fiverr person produced, and it was the lamest thing I'd ever seen. Which you'd expect. But still. Funny.

Fiverr's quirkyness reminds me a bit of http://highdeas.com/

(OT: my favourite highdea was this: http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_...)
Weak Linking and Linux Shared Libraries
Sometimes there is nothing to understand. Code produced in my project at work is a good candidate for the daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/). I tried to explain the problem to the management but they didn't change anything. Now the project is more than a year late because the thing doesn't quite work. It is quite obvious that there are problems and if nothing is done when told, than the only logical conclusion is that they are stupid. My boss's answer to this now is "that's life". "Help me to understand" is in this case a waste of time and resource. Where is Darwin again ?
There's nothing ridiculous in Fitts' law.
How big is the Fed's balance sheet?
No, that's not how it works. In Mexico the cartels are more resilient than the state.
I've tried Spanning Sync but I wasn't comfortable with giving access to my Gmail password so I gave up on it really soon.

I've also tried soocial.com which I liked because it uses OAuth and I can always just revoke its access, but it sucked when it came to Prefixes and Suffixes. I have people in my address book who happen to be Jr. and Sr. or who happen to have the same name and one had no email and it mashed them up.

NuevaSync seems more focused on the mobile aspects of things and I'm really just interested in contact syncing with as few parties in between as possible. (paranoid)
Something like that. But the other 3 just handle customer service. He does everything else.
CSS3 Transitions – Are We There Yet?
Very useful site. I just found something I was looking for. Lets see how it works out.
I actually use Gnus and Mutt with my Gmail accounts, via the offlineimap http://github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap Python app. It creates a (ridiculously huge) maildir and then I can freely browse it with Gnus, Mutt or any other MUA. It syncs read/unread, labels/folders, etc. both directions. It has filtering, renaming, and other nice stuff you can put between your maildirs and Gmail accounts.

I run it on a cronjob. With this setup, I get the great Gmail interface (and push support to my iPhone/Nexus One) when I'm on the go, and the lightning-fast Gnus/Mutt interfaces for blazing through mailing lists when I'm at a computer.

One problem is that sometimes offlineimap throws exceptions and doesn't finish a sync. I think it needs some touching up or updating. I haven't lost any data, though.
Prosecutors defend Gizmodo search in iPhone probe
I think this article is a perfect example of a what I've perceived as a growing trend of "developers" working at the "top of the stack" with no idea what is really going on under the hood.

That infact there are many, many, many developers who work on projects that are enormous that never see "end users" in the, guy who owns an iMac, sense of the word.

The implication that anyone who writes great software, but lacks "design" skills (in the graphical sense of the word) is so crazy... I wonder if this guy has ever thought about the guy who wrote the embedded realtime system in his car that runs his anti-lock breaks, no WOW factor there.

EDIT: never have I ever wished I had enough karma to vote something down before.
I thought everyone got the memo that the "webapps are the future" meme is dead.
Computer Repair Services Frederick Md, Business Phone Systems,
Microsoft signs Android patent deal with HTC
Danah boyd - Streams of Content, Limited Attention
Full title:

Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media

From the Web 2.0 Conference
Fitt's Law does not say edge elements are close to the mouse. It says edge elements are large.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
I got to agree about the lack of "bounce" - I could never move my work email to gmail for that reason alone (not to mention my preference of writing emails in my native editor).
Do you look down on non-entrepreneurs?

No.

Entrepreneurship isn't some static thing, and there are many kinds of entrepreneurs. Our appetite for risk, our values, priorities and desires all evolve over time.

Some entrepreneurs start out as employees and discover their entrepreneurial streak later in life; others start out as entrepreneurs and become employees (by acquisition, opportunity etc.); some shift from academia to entrepreneurship and back again; others are serial entrepreneurs. And so it goes...

People do great things from all sorts of roles. The disappointment and disinterest may just be naivety or a lack of maturity: I wonder if your entrepreneurial buddies look down on Hennessy for example?
I think the main problem, and I do work as UX Engineer in WPF (though I develop for iPhone/Mac at home) is the experience.

Windows has a "you are the developer, you choose how to do whatever the hell you like" experience, while Mac is more "here are our libraries, love them, sing praise to them, but try and keep it the same as much of everything else".

I was talking recently about the look of a new version of an application, and one thing I tried to pass was to keep it looking very well integrated with Windows 7 look. Avoid custom themes and colors, but 80% of the developers believe a custom theme is better. This in general doesn't make software ugly, but when you don't have (or don't want to have) the resources for a good graphics design team to do the entire design of the app, it leaves choices on the hands of programmers (not the best designers imo). Comparing to Cocoa/Mac, usually programmers use less of custom themes and go with the Cocoa flow, making the applications slightly more elegant (as they are using the resources of the Mac Design team).

But this is in no way 100% true for both platforms, there are really horrible designed apps for Mac, and gorgeous applications for Windows, just what I feel to be the general trend.

Edit: I like ToDoList: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx
It is as you say, a bit bloated, but works fine for keeping track of my programming tasks (it isn't GTD, just a hierarchal ToDo list, and open source)
The Mysterious And Scary BitTorrent Monitoring Site
I can't even get it to install, and I have over 30mb of space left on my desire for apps - this should be more than enough to install it!
Thanks to CSI and relatives, here is what the public thinks image manipulation can do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk

The ridiculousness may be lost on you if you need an explanation why a digital image of a crappy security camera can't be used to zoom in on a reflection of an eyeball. Or of why a 2-dimensional image can't be used to construct a 3-dimensional image of the scene, that you can rotate to see objects out of the line of view of the camera.
Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
Great example. Would you mind to share a link?
Here is how to get e using a calculator:

sinh(1) + cosh(1)
Picking a programming language based on personality
I think Nokia might surprise everyone - Qt 4.7 with its new Qt Quick technology allows for some extremely slick user interfaces so while Nokia have certainly disappointed in the past and are way behind Android and iphone I wouldn't rule them out just yet!
Palin email witness decries 'dog and pony' prosecution
My definition of OO is roughly the one given here: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html Meaning, doing OO is basically using closures and mutable state (let's say objects are a form of closure). I don't like mutable state, therefore I don't like OO as defined above.

We can also define OO as the use of inheritance. The problem with inheritance is that it spurs the violation of decoupling. More often than not, derived classes are tightly coupled to their base class. I don't like that. This paper also suggest that inheritance is not very good, because it would increase the error rate by 6: http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/OO_IS698.pdf (Note that I don't take this paper as a proof that OO is bad in general. Rather, it strongly suggest that C++ without templates nor the STL, used in an OO fashion, is worse than plain C).

Now, if you forbid (or severely limit) both mutable state and inheritance, I really don't see what is left to OO. We could see you `Animal` data type and the Ocaml module system as forms of OO, but at this point, "OO" would mean anything (and therefore be meaningless).

(Note: when I say "I don't like X", I mean I will avoid X as long as the resulting solution isn't demonstrably simpler.)
Ask HN - do you face the "security block" ?
I've got an idea of product that would work on top of gmail (via oauth).

I'm going to do it, yet I'm quite concerned about what it would mean to get hacked etc.

Are you sometimes stopping yourself from implementing an idea because you are concerned about security issues ?
props for ds9 reference
I'd like to hear what grellas has to say about this. Does Match have anything to stand on here? Do they have any sort of case?
One page version of the article: http://hbr.org/2010/05/how-i-did-it-googles-ceo-on-the-endur...
A word of caution though, last I tested canvas+processing was a lot slower than flash+flare, ie. don't use canvas for stuff like the link maps on vizreader.com
This might be of interest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
I'm always keeping a balance between the two, yes, absolutely.

Sidenote: having reduced your expenses will help you ensure you can feel free to smell the roses whenever you feel the need.
This sounds really cool. How does it deal with conflicts?
HTC pays Microsoft over Android patents
Open source will kill off the iPhone, says Kaspersky - Techworld.com
Sun's network.com cloud service is gone
I use emacs_chrome with Google Chrome which allows me to write E-Mail in Emacs (or actually, any editor). Under Firefox you can use the It's All Text! extension to shell out to any editor.