skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key point is that the site is named "Hacker News" and not "Apple news". Of course i understand how the site works, but if you can't see the total disproportion of apple news vs. the rest of it world, then i don't know.
In general, if Steve Jobs farts, there will be more then one link on the "New" page from which 1-2 are getting to the frontpage.
The point is, that when Sony releases a new notebook or MP3 player of mobile phone, no story will be here. If it's from Apple, several stories will be here + Stories about the stories and blog posts with one persons feelings about the story.

I already figured that the most people on Hacker News use Macs (from the photo thread of peoples workplaces many had Macs).

When i compare the numbers of how much Apple is mentioned versus the rest... look for yourself (taken from google search results):

Apple: 8070
Steve Jobs: 1030
iPhone: 5880
iPad: 2730

Microsoft: 4280
Steve Ballmer: 150
Bill Gates: 347
Microsoft Courier: 181
Nexus One: 326
Motorola Droid: 271
Vaio: 313
Xperia: 5

Now look at the market: Most Computers are PCs with Windows, most phones are not iPhones. You don't see the disproportion, do you?

Also, if you take this story. This is not news, this is just one guy praising Apple, why is this posted here!? Is this some blog aggregator? This is just not news.
It's hard to go wrong with anything written by Michael Lewis.
I'll just confirm that I had the same problem and doing the -windowed trick worked for me. Once you do it, you can switch back to full screen in the settings.
Except that screw up may wind up costing Fortune a good chunk of change, in either lost advertising revenue from the "exclusive" or from Simon and Schuster seeking damages for some contract violation.

Given the size of Fortune's response and S&S getting involved, my gut tells me it's the latter.
I and probably most people I deal with have smart phones, etc., and yet I still find a need to be jotting down something quick.

And the situation is quite different when I am looking to do business with a non-tech person. Things are not always so ubiquitous in different groups of people, "modern age" not withstanding.

And even if you could get the same results using a device, there are business/social reasons to hand someone a note written on your business card.

Some inefficiencies have value. Don't be blind to them.
Remove background from Glass to make it Transparent.
Size of spill underestimated, scientists say
Apologies in advance for bringing my pet peeve in here, but it's Coloradan, not Colordoan.

Colorado's a spanish word -- the way I think about it is "Would you say 'Mexicoan'?"

Also, note: I have a twitter account for this peeve. http://twitter.com/itscoloradan
I had that too the first time I started the game. I quit and restarted it and the sound worked fine.
Don't you think that most startups that get into such trouble that they have to wipe out the common shareholders end up dying? I realize there are cases where the company bounces back, but it seems like not bouncing back is more common.
The poor performance verses Windows doesn't surprise me. Consider, my Mac is about a year old; while it's a Pro model, it was the entry level model. Despite this, the game plays well (no human perceptable stutter) at full resolution and settings. Valve isn't really motivated to optimize this game due to its age and how the current Mac hardware pool surpasses what PCs were (even accounting for the Mac platform's GPU lag) when Portal was originally released.

The real proof in the pudding is when Valve starts to release Mac/PC dual releases like they've been hinting at. If they have the same problems Blizzard has getting decent performance for their hybrid releases, Apple might finally notice that their lagging on GPU support is a problem and not something they can continue to dismiss/hand off as the developer's responsibility. (I know... dream on.)
Dating.com Sells For $1.75M, Domain Sales Heat Up
Full Internet access restored in Xinjiang, says Chinese government
Lesson from HN: Self-regulating communities
Google Translate adds Armenian, Azeri, Georgian, Basque, and Urdu alpha versions
Pivotal Tracker - pivotaltracker.com
We know what his views are. It's more interesting whether he tells the truth about them publicly or not.
Startups: Inbox addiction is hurting you
This video is excellent. Long, yes, but well worth it, thanks for the link.
Twitter has it too: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22

I wrote a paper in grad school about people leaking info on twitter unwittingly, and finding it using queries like these. http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf
Actually, it is. Mr. Lewis can spin a fine yarn, but as with much of his first major work (Liar's Poker), a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader narrative.

With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team, or even individual, performance in baseball.

Basketball is an entirely different kind of animal. The data miner in me looks forward to seeing if this sort of analysis will offer genuinely useful predictive performance models this sport.
FYI: Zumodrive's link at the bottom of the page is broken (zumodrive.om)
“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

This strikes me as an extremist viewpoint. Portraying oneself more conservatively in less familiar company is often essential. Indeed, in some cases (private thoughts, for instance) the only appropriate company with which to share is oneself.
Well, Wave is still in "Technical Preview". Hopefully, business-class apps won't need a "down for maintenance" sign.
Fixed; thanks.
With spiders of course. The cows will be somewhat harder to remove.
Arrington's just being Arrington. Nothing to be done about that.

Characteristically, he is ebulliently and abrasively assertive--indeed, at times belligerent--of his right to publish whatever he feels like publishing that day, and often frames it as a freedom of speech issue in a commercial context.

This is a trait of, on the one hand, some of the world's most venerable investigative journalists and insightful commentators, but, on the other hand, also of the sleazy yellow press and fraternal unprincipled viewership/readership/ratings whores with more ignoble motives.

As far as I can tell, TechCrunch is a slightly less toxic kind of Daily Mail. It should not be controversial to any reasonable person that there is merit to both sides of the issue insofar as lack of initial explicit prohibition on publication of whole excerpts does not necessarily mean it was categorically acceptable, nor does it mean that any demands for retroactive remedies from Fortune are irrelevant. On the other hand, they are obviously both trying to bully him and do something quite stupid.
The End of the Facebook Era
I am moving there next month just for the climbing. It seems to be the only place where you can get a decent tech job and still be within walking distance of some sweet rocks.
The opt-in/opt-out example I've seen the most is 401k contributions. If people have to opt-out of automatically putting part of their paycheck into their 401k, more people make contributions. The idea isn't that people are being tricked into it, although some people probably didn't read carefully enough and don't notice the part of their paycheck missing. The idea is that people are less likely to change from defaults in general. Most people know they should save, so actively saying "No, I don't want to save" by checking an opt-out box feels worse then leaving an opt-in box blank.

I don't think most people are mistakenly sharing things with more people than they intended on Facebook. When they made the privacy changes and presented everyone with the dialog that let you set all of your privacy settings, 35% of users picked something other than the defaults[1]. It was pretty clear what was going on. For a refresher, here's a video that walks through what the transition actually looked like: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-new-...

The only thing Facebook handled poorly in terms of privacy was Instant Personalization. It was... instant. Yelp/Pandora/Docs have my Facebook data linked with my account from the moment I visit the site, which may not be what I want. (I actually like it on Pandora and Yelp. I don't use Docs.) To make matters worse, it's annoyingly difficult to opt out of Instant Personalization altogether. I think this is what offended people the most, then the firestorm made people bring up peripheral non-issues that piled on and made the PR disaster worse. Beacon redux.

[1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...
Yes, that's a good point. Another reason not to be a founder is that you don't want to waste your time working on all the random crap that founders inevitably have to. Though actually the first several employees usually have to do a lot of random crap too. I'm not sure how big a company has to get before there start to be people who don't have to. I'd guess at least 10 people.
I have some experience with almost every part of this spectrum. I worked for a few years for a startup in London that grew from 3 people when I started, to 7 people, and then we got acquired and shipped over to Silicon Valley.

Enter the Golden Handcuff phase - definitely my favorite in many ways! We were treated like royalty for a while - given lots of nice benefits and some very interesting and challenging problems to work on, with resources to match (we purchased more than 1000 powerful servers and put them in a huge cage in a colo!). We had nice offices with windows. I had a nice apartment in Palo Alto and a rental car paid for by the company for about a year.

After about a year things started to tail off. Our project became less strategically important to the company that had acquired us. We were gradually starved of resources and attention. The perks went away one by one.

The transformation was slow, but sure. Eventually even the offices with windows went away, and we were moved to crappy cubes where you couldn't see windows even if you stood on your desk.

In the end, the daily routine for everyone on the team was something like a 10am-4pm work day, filled with browsing reddit and playing ping-pong or air hockey. Nobody noticed, or if they did, they no longer cared.

Finally my Green Card arrived (after three years). As soon as it did, I quit and joined my next startup (Justin.TV).
Express, MongoDB & Node.js tutorial (updated)
Remember, this is the same facebook that showed your private chat to others. Mentioning security in the same sentence implies that it is a joke.
He's rather open with things that are assumed public but also assumed to likely stay within the relatively small communities whence they germinated. Not technically a violation of anything, but morally inconsiderate without asking first.

I'll make no secret of my own grudge with Arrington. Back in December, I wrote this comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998318 - on Hacker News, rather critical of loud web acquisitions by Russian investors. Without so much as a heads up, to say nothing of a polite request for permission, this earned me a TechCrunch post: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/are-hot-u-s-startups-the-ne... ...

Perhaps obviously but perhaps not, as a native Russian, and given what I had to say in that comment, I am not particularly interested in the kind of magnified exposure or attention that being linked on TechCrunch provides. It was a genuine statement of opinion that I more or less intended for the general HN audience. I don't really need it rubbed in the faces of these barons' hit-men that I, uh, slandered them. Sure, it's part and parcel of posting something to the public Internet, and, certainly, anyone searching Google can find my comment easily -- fine. But a little bit of consideration from Arrington's yellow journalism machine might have been helpful.
I agree. He's such a superb writer, that no matter how long or convoluted the article is, he can keep you enthralled right to the very end. His piece at the now-defunct Portfolio magazine was one of the best articles on the financial crisis that I have read:
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...
They don't die, they become zombies. The last startup I left 3 years ago is going to limp along forever because the investors won't kill it. At this point I believe the entire corporate entity has been restructured so that none of the original employees nor even the founder will make money in the unlikely case of a liquidity event. This isn't the only "startup" I know of in this situation. Im not really sure what the point of this is other than to give members of the SV subclass of professional startup executives and EIRs something to do...
Good idea; yes, I should add a link there.
I know nothing about Twitter, but in general it's simple. If there are 199 employees, you can't give the 200th more than 0.5%, else that would be unfair, right? That person would have to be something really special, like a CEO or VP, to expect more when coming to the party so late. So that's the absolute maximum ceiling.

Usually about 10 to 30% of the company is reserved for employees (the rest goes to the founders and investors --- mostly investors, by this stage). So employee #200's theoretical maximum is down to 0.15% or 0.05%. And she's not going to be the last. Over time more investments and employees mean you get diluted more and more.

So do the math yourself, but remember that there are a lot of other factors, like taxes, specific skills, etc etc. If you get acquired, it's not as though they write big novelty checks and hand them out like it's a golf tournament. You exchange startup stock (some of it unvested!) for other-company stock.

Risk, impact, autonomy and reward are remarkably correlated to how early you join. But if you are in it for just one of those four things you might have a hard time adjusting to the rest.
I don't see how that is much different, syntactically, from:

public void service(ServletRequest req, ServletResponse res) throws IOException {
res.getWriter().println("hello");
}

Yes, JavaScript is dynamically typed so you don't have to type the types.
We always (eventually) run into problems with Wikis, since we always end up with huge PDF or XLS files that we want to add to wikis.

Currently, we are using Dropbox as a replacement for our wiki
HN Bookmarklet to make all comments visible
This is a very simple bookmarklet I am using to make comments with -ve points (which are not readable) more visible.
Sigh, I meant to delete this after editting the first post. Sorry! :(
Facebook adds new security tools
what's a carputer?
Title needs to tell people what sort of a relationship they're going to have with you, and who you are.

A common mistake is with selecting an overblown "corporate" title when you're tiny.

For instance I'd suggest "Founder" rather than "CEO" - speaking from personal experience here:

When I started my first business in the late 90’s I listed my title as "General Partner" (it was an LLC, made sense to me) and had more than a few people raise eyebrows, smile knowingly at the amateur hour that had just handed them a card.

My other favorite ambiguous but accurate title that's not overblown is "Business Development" . . .
I heard this on my local TV news touting it as a new privacy measure...and then I found details via the link.

What exactly does this have to do with privacy? It deals with someone who tries to hack your facebook account but has nothing to do with their use of your information...or am I missing the boat on this?
His no. 10 is wrong. That's a perfectly valid, and, in fact, the expected way to print phonenumbers in systems that has a long-distance selector. It's his scanner-software that isn't up for the job.

The rest of his points are mostly valid, and examples of sacrificing usefulness over artfulness.
Marc Andreessen: An hour of Q&A at Stanford
Is this a replacement for stuff like Python's eventlet, etc. ?
I mean, if I am not building a web-app (but a network app nevertheless), does it still make sense to use Node.js ?

For example, someone wrote the same example in eventlet, gevent, node.js, eventmachine, tornado and twisted.
http://gist.github.com/376416

it's pretty obvious how to use gevent from your python code, how does one use node.js (without resorting to web frameworks, like Django etc.)
We just need experiment happy Aliens to clean up the cows . . .
I think the statistics on loan default rates and debt load are the most telling:

"with borrowers who attended for-profit colleges defaulting at a rate of 11.9 percent (up from 11.0 percent in 2007), public college borrowers at a rate of 6.2 percent (up from 5.9 percent), and private nonprofit college borrowers at 4.1 percent, up from 3.7 percent." (Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/04/qt/student_loa...)

"At public colleges, 38 percent had no loans, 51 percent had debt less than $30,500 and 12 percent borrowed more than $30,500. At private nonprofits, 28 percent had no debt, 48 percent had debt less than $30,500 and 24 percent owed more than that. However, only 4 percent of graduates at for-profit schools finished with no loans, while 43 percent had loans totaling less than $30,500 and 53 percent owed more than $30,500, the study showed." (Source: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/education/...)
Lived in Boulder for two years now and I love it out here. Weather is, for the most part, amazing and it is really hard to beat the view. Also an outdoor sports heaven.

I should mention that the startup I work for is hiring, so if you want a change of pace and have real experience with iPhone and/or game development, send a resume to justin@backflipstudios.com
i have a comment or rather a doubt myself related to this.
During my college days I was very interested in embedded linux, being highly involved with Linux in college.
I joined an 'Embedded Systems' company, but ended up in Microsoft Application Team doing SQL Server, and might be doing some .NET device communications in future. I asked for Linux Device Communication. But me being a CS graduate, the company refused. What chance do I have to get back to the network programming domain after one more year( i have an agreement to stay till then) ?
How do we know that there aren't optimizations left to be done on the engine? This is two days after launch on a new backend. Surely there is room left to grow.
Could someone please hurry up and write a well-supported, popular lisp that compiles to javascript and runs on V8 (it could be friends with clojure)? I hate hate hate javascript's syntax and object model, but evented I/O in a lisp would be heavenly to work with.
Matt Mullenweg claims that 8.5% of the world's websites are running WordPress
Can't watch it, i'm on an iPad
Did they discuss using underground nuclear explosion to pinch off the well? It seems like a simple and proven solution.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-just...

Would this not work? Is it just politically incorrect?
SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8 Billion
Hiring tends to be issue number 1 for all startups that get over the initial threshold of raising significant funding. Now that so many of the startups we've funded are over that threshold, we were hearing more and more about it. So we started to think whether there was anything we could do to help them, and it seemed like the best thing we could do would be to make the idea of working for a startup more real to more programmers.

I think most programmers apply to work at big companies largely by default. They know what to expect when they do that. They know that startups exist, of course, but if they haven't met many in person, the idea of going to work for one doesn't seem like a real possibility. So we thought that if we could make the idea seem real, by (a) explaining all about it and (b) introducing people to a lot of actual startups, at least they wouldn't simply go to big companies by default. They'd actually weigh the two alternatives, and that would probably cause more to work for startups.
To someone with the proper technical skills, it's trivial as you say. But until you do something like what these guys have done, it's dishonest (or geek-myopic) to say that it was trivially available before. When you package it up like this to inject into a receptive media channel, you make it "available" to an audience that would not have had access to this information before.

The rhetorical impact of choosing "playing hooky" over "weight" is obvious, and not the problem here. The problem is that someone whose main motivation was obviously geek cred and not solving a problem went straight for a collateral-damage campaign instead of one of the many other options available. Fixing the Facebook privacy policy is not worth endangering the livelihood of even one of these people.
My most recent haircut is participating in this exact program. It'll be floating around the Gulf soon :)
Are there any women there? Silicon valley is for the celibate, and every snowboard town ive been to, he dudes all have to, uh, share. From its description boulder sounds like it should be the worst of all worlds if you're single. But maybe I'm wrong...
Great timing - I just abandoned an idea because I could not find a wiki-type product for what I wanted. Basically, I want to create a wiki to keep track of many different properties and the associated images, lease documents, information etc on each lease in a portfolio. A wiki would be fine, but I also want to run some analysis on a small subset of structured data such as Lease start dates, amount of rent, future rent, dates of lease expiries etc.

If I went to the trouble of inputting all this information, I would want to have the ability to script some of the data I input, kind of like a wiki page but with some structured tags etc. Things like Google maps, photo galleries, PDF previews would be icing on the cake.
"A Bluetooth version of the AirTurn is currently under development for the Apple iPad, and is expected to be available towards the end of 2010."

Nice. Hopefully the iPad device is a lot less than $200 though.
maybe that's a good reason to violate most of these rules, except for those that respect the ordinary card recipient.
Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour
Bias much?
Cause of Gastrointestinal Cancer | Gastrointestinal Cancer Symptoms
I heard somebody say something to the effect that the iPhone was the phone Steve Jobs wanted (thus explaining how the company executed so perfectly on it).

Sadly, they went on to say it was obvious Jobs isn't a gamer.

I love my Macbook. I'm thrilled with Valve for their decision to make OS X a first-tier platform. I wish to no end Apple would take gaming more seriously.
Aaron... Aaron... Aaron! GET OVER IT!

House System, was, at best, about 10% as influential in the creation of Facebook as was Friendster. You take every opportunity to hate on Mark and Facebook, even when it makes no sense... Why can't you just move on? Mark/Facebook owe you nothing; quit deluding yourself. Go be productive!!
The difference that stuck out to me the most was the lighting. Look at the transparent pipe at the top of the room or the shadows and specular highlights coming from the office on the left. At least for now, it seems that the graphics engine may not quite have feature parity with the Direct3D version.
I too stopped signing in to facebook well before it became trendy. My reason was that facebook was becoming more open and less like the closed social network I shared with my friends.
On Thursday afternoon I gave my talk 'Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour' at BSDCan'10. Two HNers (as far as I know -- there might be more?) came to hear me speak, but several other people here have said that they would like to see talk but couldn't attend; so here's my talk slides.

I understand that a recording will go online somewhere at some point, but I'm not entirely sure of the details about that.