skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ran in to this the other day as well. The weird thing is that prior to this email no one in the retail stores or the Apple customer relations line would say anything beyond "it's Apple's policy" and couldn't point to anywhere on Apple's site where it's in writing. Eventually I found Apple's Retail Store purchase policies: http://www.apple.com/legal/sales_policies/retail_us.html which say that you can't buy an iPad with a gift card. The store reps seemed annoyed when I pressed for information, saying things like "I don't know, I'm just an employee. It's Apple policy." while the corporate customer relations rep offered to enter my concerns in some database.

The gift cards themselves say that "Apple reserves the right in its sole discretion to determine whether gift cards may be applied to purchases of particular products or services." So, while they technically tell you that you may not be able to buy anything with the card, it's still a pretty weird situation. Especially because you can still use a gift card to buy an iPad on the online Apple store.
Have you compared this to Outlook 2010's threading?
Pointless change for the sake of change is what causes me to react negatively.
Shrug. We own a few thousand licenses for each, but if you're experiences are different, that's cool. Either way, the point I'm making is that most business who use Linux use it because it's a great server OS.
I'm not suggesting that we should not pursue nuclear, wind, solar, or other sources of energy. But even building out a nuclear electric generating capacity sufficient to replace our current oil needs would take decades. Wind and solar have theoretical potential but are certainly far from proven on that scale. And not without environmental impact of their own.

In the meantime, we need oil. We should understand what went wrong here, and try to prevent it from happening again.
What proportion of computers sold in the last year ran Windows 98?

Ok, the market for selling Win98 computers is dead, then, we agree?

So what remains is the leftovers of the people who already bought those computers. But no one will buy a new one.

So, going back to the iPad... people who are saying something like the iPad will kill, say, the personal computer industry (like Charles Stross) aren't arguing that everyone's PCs will suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke. No one would be stupid enough to argue that.

What they're arguing is that the iPad and devices like it will transform the landscape of devices sold. Right now, probably 0.01% of computer-like devices are "tablet computers" and 99.99% are "PCs" (i.e. netbooks, desktops, macbooks, etc). What people who predict the "death" of those computers are predicting is a reversal of that sales situation - i.e. a not-so-distant future where 99+% of "computers" sold are tablets, and only a negligible percentage are traditional computers.

Sure, there'll still be people using Win98 even then, but who cares? Anyone who spends any money on computer-like equipment will have moved on to spending their money on something else (both hardware and software).
Do we have info on what backdoors in major commercial programs look like? I'm going to guess a large company isn't going to embed a whole large backdoor -- too much liability and risk of discovery.

Instead, wouldn't it be better to make the backdoor another mundane security hole? And open soure can certainly ship plenty of those (FireFox?).

So, really, in both cases, you need an experienced developer that can code in a security hole without being caught during review. Not every boring feature checked in gets the same level of "eyeballs".
I think it's feasible to hit them without looking as is, with just the haptic feedback. And in the dark, they light up. But yes, full physical buttons will still have an advantage in some scenarios.
Are there actually ecological impacts from offshore wind turbines? From what I've read, they rarely hit birds. Bats are another story, but I don't think there are too many bats flying around offshore.

On a side note, there's not much potential for wind turbines in most places, the wind just isn't strong enough:
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_wind_national_lo-res.jpg
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_wind_national_hi-res.jpg
They could give him cash and they could still refuse to sell it to him. It's legal to not accept cash.

http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.s...
The video itself outlines that for research LSD needs to be treated like a drug:

Karl Janson... warns of the dangers of unsupervised use

I think one important lesson is psychodelics are by-and-large catalysts. What happens very much depends on who uses it, under what circumstances and for what purpose.

I'm not against the taking of LSD, I've taken it myself. I am against it being treated like candy, with no respect. It certainly cannot be substituted for alcohol.

I would not want anyone reading to just go out and take it. Have a clear plan and a good support network around them: or don't take it.

You can't prove something doesn't make you mad by looking at brain chemistry.
Ugh. The least we could do is prevent companies who don't produce software from litigating on software patents. This "IP Innovation" place is just a patent troll.
I didn't bother to delete my account emailing (didn't even now about that). I just deleted my content (two post), name and avatar. I did this sometime ago. Because of this incident I would certainly do the same now if I was still a Posterous user.
They're requiring you to use a credit card and that's pretty simple to track (only 2 per card).
Carpenters don’t seem to suffer from the same error of judgement. There might be several brands of hammers offering slightly different features, but they all pound nails into wood.

Awful analogy. Software is like capentry (in the small) and architecture (in the large). In both cases materials matter. A language is the material for building a particular kind of structure, not only a tool for building that structure.

Consider the fact that many programming languages fail miserably at concurrency. Is that because you don't know how to use the hammer, or because you picked a really bad material for building that particular kind of structure?

EDIT: Thought about this some more, changed my negative slant on carpentry. Furniture is a delicate and beautiful sculptural practice. In carpentry materials matter just as much.
For better or for worse, anything that autoupdates without asking for permission is an absolute non-starter in enterprise.

I imagine a possibly small but definitely vocal group of users, too. Not everyone thinks whatever the browser maker thinks is newest and greatest actually is the greatest.
According to the article, the leak didn't develop until 2 days after the explosion. The rig didn't sink immediately, but when it did, the pipe was damaged and the oil began leaking.

Is it possible that the pipe could have been detached from the platform and this leak prevented? Or can future designs have this capability?

It seems like there was time to act to prevent this from happening. And even if there weren't, perhaps future designs can be built to detach safely when an explosion has occurred.

For example, there are doubled lined tankers, why not a pipe within a pipe? One highly flexible not very good at maintaining pressure for pumping to handle accidents, but surrounding one that is optimized for normal operation.

Valves that automatically shut off when a pipeline's management system can no longer sense parts of the pipeline would also be good.

I realize that I do not understand the physics of how these systems work and welcome explanations of it. But certainly there is room for innovation in this area, especially considering the high costs of these disasters.
e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0

It's a plus there.
If your job is to build new technology products, is there a difference between a technology being dead and the users of those technologies not adopting any new technology? I don't think so. Saying Windows 98 is dead is just short hand for saying users of Windows 98 are never going to be my customers so I don't need to build a Win98 compliant desktop version of my product.
How's the touchscreen? The thing I've always hated about Android devices was the jerky scrolling on web pages, as apposed to how it's silky smooth on the iPhone/pad.
I got this phone on day one. I've used most smartphones out there, this by far offers the most pleasant experience.

If you're looking to get one, I'd say the overall thing that blows me away is the performance in general. I've never used a more responsive phone- that includes the iphone. Sense UI, is better than I thought. In fact, I thought I was gonna flash it and put stock android on there, but now I think next time if I don't get an HTC, I might flash it and put sense on it.

Only downer is batter life- but that's an issue with most phones.
The Wall Street regulation overhaul gives FTC authority over the Internet
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وفياريال
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وفياريال
The browser has to render the CSS, which takes a non-zero amount of time. It's possible that the browser rendering time of some (very) complex CSS could surpass the time to fetch an image over the network and render that.
An adobe/earthcrete Earthship might be a great idea in a southwest desert setting. It would be stupid to build one in a much of Houston.

EDIT: Taking your analogy further, I have occasionally seen the exact same sculpture made out of several different materials, because the sculptor was experimenting. I've also seen such studies where the piece was executed very differently to take advantage of the different potentials of the materials.
If change were always a good thing, and temporary uncomfort good - do you mind if I borrow that office chair of yours and replace it with a different one?
If you're still bored, there's this French-layout keyboard I could give you. And - no, don't use it with UK/US layout, that would be boring.

Unwarranted change - one that you push onto others without asking, and without really having a good reason - is usually a bad thing in terms of usability - especially when one of your Linux machines suddenly has the window buttons on one side whereas all the others have them on the other.

If it were a radical improvement in usability, I'd say go for it, but as it is, you're typically at the right side of a window when you don't want to have the mouse cursor inside it (or to be near the scroll bar, because the scroll wheel doesn't work when you're mousing over that flash movie), so you have to go a shorter way if the buttons are on the right.
I meant how do I know which one of those formats to choose.
I don't think this is true. There were a couple of academic studies showing that low doses of LSD (~25 mics) improved creativity during the session, but I don't think there have been any studies showing that a normal dose improved creativity the next day.

FYI The book What The Dormouse Said talks about the influence of LSD on the technology industry.
Sure it's legal, that's not what this is all about.

You shouldn't do it.

It's perfectly legal for me to wipe the histories of all my users from ww.com, it was equally legal for Yahoo! to wipe geocities.

But that doesn't make it right.

Sending a mass email to all the users when they change the cafetaria menu is a clear attempt at drawing this into the ridiculous, as contrasted by simply updating their terms of service and a two line blog post as to why they updated the terms of service.

I don't know what kind of email policies posterous has, maybe they have a mailing list, maybe not but that isn't really relevant.

It's common courtesy to keep your users informed and it helps to keep your users and your company aware of what the status quo is.

To wipe stuff like this under the carpet makes your company look untrustworthy.
Thanks and note that we were never "blindly" copying their model. It was a place for us to start and then see what worked or didn't and start innovating from there. Obviously, we're a bunch of entrepreneurs so we're always going to be tinkering and toying with the model so that we drive value both for ourselves and the startups we invest in.
True, and nor can we can conserve our way out of the problem. I'm not opposed to offshore drilling - we can apply lessons from this tragedy to future projects. but I do think that partial improvements have great potential when considered in aggregate. wind is constantly improving, the energy itself is free, and capital costs are falling to be competitive with those of fossil fuel installations. The same is true of solar.

I'm strongly in favor of adding more nuclear power too - both for its large generation capability, and because the US badly needs to recover erstwhile technological and industrial lead in this area. South Korea recently snatched a big contract to build a nuclear station in the Middle East, and it's a depressing fact that the world's only steel plant capable of manufacturing the large single-unit containment chambers for a reactor is in Japan.
Does anyone really believe anymore that S.J. himself writes all the letters / messages which are so popular lately? I sometimes don't have time to respond to everyone, even though I'm just a developer. I know many managers who could spend the whole day writing and answering emails and they're not even that high in the hierarchy. I can't even imagine how many emails must Steve get from inside the company -- and these are the emails he has to actually handle himself.

I remember an article about Bill Gates a couple of years ago saying that there was a team of ~10 people handling his mail, but can't google it now :/ I don't believe S.J. would answer himself, if the question can be handled by any assistant with access to some internal knowledge-base. (just like this one)

Edit: not what I saw originally, but: http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwo... <- in 2006 B.G. got only ~100 emails a day from people worth his attention - the rest got filtered out / handled by assistant. And there was already some time after Vista. S.J. probably gets more right now since the iPad release.
A large part of the "show" is to increase public support for financial reform.
Mostly Windows on a daily basis, although I have used linux and I've done a bunch of research into the various window management systems linux offers, including Awesome. The window tagging thing you're talking about is definitely a step in the right direction -- what I'm envisioning is something along those lines, but more naturally integrated into the shell.
Which he can now get back in cash. No biggie IMO. In the world of Apple's many issues, this is a small one solving a "real problem" as much as you view shortages of popular consumer devices a "Real problem"
I didn't know you could access the data that easily. It certainly opens up for some creative imagery, as the article clearly shows.

I wish he would have made the source available for what generated those image though! Would make it easier to get right into it and start playing.
Change is good. Temporary uncomfort is good.

This isn't like moving to a new city to broaden your horizons. I didn't find changing the side the buttons were on expanded my consciousness and brought about a refreshing personal transformation.

No, the button change simply annoyed me because it was pointless, and ruined years of muscle memory (till I turned it off). Change for the sake of change can be good in some areas of life, but for the simple day to day stuff, if it isn't broken, don't fix it unless you're actually making it better.

Has anyone actually found the new buttons better? The closest I've heard anyone say is, "eh, I got used to em pretty quick". I'd hardly call that a ringing endorsement.

I found them actively bad, as they're right on top of all your menus, which could lead to mistaken menu clicks and vice versa.
Of course nobody has more than one card, and of course nobody could ever have a shipping address different from their home address on some of their cards for their business... and then there are all those people that have no friends that would allow them to go and buy an iPad because they're not going to. And so on.

The weird thing about stuff like this is that those that want to get their hands on as many ipads as they want are likely not going to be deterred by this, the majority of the people this will bite are just regular guys and girls that want to buy a product.
+1 for making me crack up japherwocky
Ask HN: Why are my submissions invisible to all but me?
Hello All,
I recently noticed that all of my submissions can't be seen by anyone except myself when I am logged in. I am still pretty new to all of this so perhaps I have run afoul of the system somehow. I know one submission I made (not the most recent one) was not correct; but I'm not sure if that's the cause. Can someone please tell me a proper course of action to fix my account, and notes on how to be a better submitter; thanks!
The software and CS fields are also relatively nascent. Programming languages today are arguably better than the ones we had available to use 20 years ago, whereas a hammer you buy today is pretty much as good as one you could buy 200 years ago.
You're way off base.
- I haven't lost any employees so painting me with that brush is wrong
- I never made any commentary on the guy who left Mahalo - I wrote him a private email making it clear that my commentary had nothing to do with him (I didn't even know that story when I wrote my post)
- I never publicly insulted anybody
- I made a balanced argument that if people leave a few employers early in their careers it's fine. If they make a career out of changing jobs they'll find it hard in the long-run to wind up in senior positions.

And while we're on the topic of insulting posts or people on a rant, why don't you re-read your text and think about how IT sounds
I can't help but think that Google Wave missed out. They were no where close to being ready when they released it. Some of the no-brainer features like deleting waves and removing someone from a wave is just being introduced in the last few months. The speed was always an issue, but it only improved in the last few months. And the UI, while beautiful, is not intuitive (three panels as opposed to two panels in gmail?).

The whole concept is great, but their delivery failed. I am sure there always will be niche users who love wave and use it often but doubt it will ever have anywhere close to wide adoption like email.
Pool proxy votes with other independent shareholders
Ask HN: Do you run(or work at) a b2b or b2c startup?
Curious to see what's the split between b2b (enterprise) and b2c startups on HN.

How many b2c startups are profitable vs. b2b startups?
AJAX in 5 minutes using jQuery
> Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.

I'm not sure if Fusion would be much better than fission (which isn't to say that it's not good, just that it doesn't seem nearly as much of an improvement as some would want us to believe (many of those people writing grant proposals)):

http://www.rationalfuturist.com/writings/fusion.html

What I'd really like to see is a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Check out this Google Tech Talk about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
The moral of this recent flux of letters and e-mails: Steve Jobs needs to start a blog or get on Twitter.
hopefully this kills the plan to expand offshore oil drilling along the US coast.
It's explained by Steve's response in the article.
Ask HN: Why are my submissions invisible to all but me?
Hello All, I recently noticed that all of my submissions can't be seen by anyone except myself when I am logged in. The user name in question is omegasoft (I made this account just so this post could be visible). I am still pretty new to all of this so perhaps I have run afoul of the system somehow. I know one submission I made (not the most recent one) was not correct; but I'm not sure if that's the cause. Can someone please tell me a proper course of action to fix my account, and notes on how to be a better submitter; thanks!
You’re absolutely right, that’s all it is—a courtesy. They are being uncourteous at worse; but being uncourteous does not equate, in my mind, to being ‘not right’ in a moral sense. Again, it is entirely their prerogative to make this change, therefore there is simply no way it can be ’not right’. This has already been drawn in to the absurd, because a mountain is being made of a molehill. It’s just not a big deal. I don’t think this makes them untrustworthy at all. In fact, I would be more inclined to trust them now, because if they’re making money off affiliate links, there’s a far less likely chance the service vanishes into thin air six months from now when they burn through all of their venture funding without having made a penny. I think you’re being overly idealistic about a practical business decision they made.
Jason redeems himself. Great post. This whole spectacle is obscene.
Nice idea in theory, but easy for the trolls to work round by producing some trivial piece of software, I'd have thought.
The zillion file person was a hypothetical, but I'll give you a real world example: I use two monitors, and I tend to arrange files I'm working with into groups on the two desktops. I have the browser open in one window, and since I know what the groups are (and they're arranged to not overlap with my browser window), finding a particular file that I would want to drag to imageshack takes a fraction of a second, drag and dropping would take another second max. Finding the file in the browser dialog ignores all the grouping and placement I have done on the desktop and just sorts things by filename. It takes significantly longer for me to find files with that dialog than the 1.5 seconds to drag a file to firefox.
Apparently a "pungent" oil smell has enveloped New Orleans. One of the guys quoted is saying that his "nose was burning" after walking his dog.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/04/katrina-of-smell-new...
"If change were always a good thing, and temporary uncomfort good - do you mind if I borrow that office chair of yours and replace it with a different one? If you're still bored, there's this French-layout keyboard I could give you. And - no, don't use it with UK/US layout, that would be boring."

These are not good examples. I just use whichever chair is closest to where I want to sit when I want to sit, and I switch between dvorak and qwerty more than once a day without even noticing any more. Likewise, I anticipate, whichever side the close button is on. These are utterly inconsequential changes. I'd be willing to bet that the time I would save each day by having the close button more often nearer to where the mouse pointer is when I need to close a window is swallowed up in a single digressive conversation lasting less than a few minutes.
Arg; I thought this was going to go under the "ask" tab. Man I really stink at this!
This is especially sweet for me, not more than a few days ago I mentioned this very company trying to shake down TrueTech about 10 years ago :)

Props to RedHat, at least some companies are standing up to this bullshit in stead of paying them off so they have a bigger warchest to go after the next target.
Someone else will grow another service into a 70% Google Wave. Once that prepares people for the idea, something like this will succeed.
The pipe has a valve at its base called the blow-out preventer which is supposed to seal off the flow entirely. At the moment, this doesn't appear to have been fully closed again probably due to the damage caused by the sinking platform.

I'm sure there will be lessons learnt from this incident.

More info here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8651333.stm
We Have A Duty
It's not on the 'ask' tab because it doesn't have enough votes yet.

EDIT: And now this has 3 votes, and I see it at the top of the 'ask' tab.