skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
R.E.A.C.T. is an outrage. Most police departments don’t put a ton of effort into resolving nonviolent theft cases. Obviously big rich Silicon Valley companies like Apple are going to have a lot of political clout in Santa Clara county come what may, but that’s a reality that should be pushed against not formalized. Apple can afford its own lawyers, it doesn’t need the cops working for it.
This trajectory has been going for perhaps a few decades, but human embarrassment is thousands of years old. So you can't just say "Oh, old people always think young people are too risque. Get over it." There is some structure to the current trend, and it seems worthwhile to try to explain it (though the OP fails, IMO).

Now, that doesn't mean that the threshold for human embarrassment has been static since before the industrial revolution; looking at history, it has certainly varied dramatically across time and space. It's probably not random, so tracing it's cause would be interesting.

Further, I don't think many people are going to go to the extreme relativist standpoint and say that all thresholds for embarrassment are equally (un-)valuable. It's not hard to make arguments for why it's a good thing people are too embarrassed to have sex in public (though I'm sure there are a few extreme bullet-biters). So then the question is, can you defend what you think is an optimal threshold for embarrassment, whether or not it coincides with the current threshold? The OP doesn't seem to be able to defend his, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't/can't be done.
They probably do need to lighten up but I can see their point here. Ellen's poking fun at herself but Apple's afraid it will translate into "the iPhone is hard to use". Apple's now looking to target the Computer Illiterate folks and the fake commercial could be seen as a sign that it's hard to use. Which is why Colbert and Stewart (who mocked the company and not a specific product) didn't get calls.

It's reactionary but not illogical.
"Now any document can become a Web page."

Now if only I didn't have to log in to read it.
This is my anecdotal experience as well. It would be great to see a distribution of activity level for facebookers, and how much high-activity facebookers tend to associate with each other. My guess is that the low activity level of older generations is better explained by their unfamiliarity with computers than a lower threshold for embarrassment.
How big of a role did SEO play in this decision?
> Assertion #3: It is in the VCs' interest to acquire the most ownership of a company at the lowest price with the least risk.

Not quite - the investor's interest depends on their strategy, but it's balancing their desired return, resources, and risk. If you own 60% of a company, you've got to manage it, pay attention to it, keep a close eye on the books. If you own 5% of a company, and a savvy honorable investor owns 40%, and the rest is spread between founders, employee, and other investors - you don't have to watch it so closely. So you might get a better deal buying 5% at a worse valuable than 60% at a better valuable - because of the resources/time that will be required of you.

Investors want to maximize their return - but they also need to consider their strategy, what resources they have, how active they want to be, what their time horizon is, and so on, and so on. Saying they're after the biggest piece possible for the least money isn't quite right. If taking a bigger piece of the company makes the company less likely to make it, a smart investor won't do that.
Web 2.0 Expo: A Look At The Future Of Web Browsers, From The Guys Who Build Them
"the author mentions the coworker who mentioned that he's shaved his whole body in preparation for a bicycling event... as a relatively young member of society, I see nothing wrong with this information."

I think that depends a little on the details provided. I wouldn't want to know whether your total body shave included your scrotum for example.

Either way, you're right. I remember listening to people talk about having shaved for racing events long before the advent of 'social media.' I don't think that a lot has changed except for the subsiding of some of the formality of the workplace and a few other things.
SHIFT-JIS is important because ruby is a japanese language with a huge foothold in Japan. A lot of SHIFT-JIS gets processed by ruby.
The State of Oil Spill Cleaning Technology
The change isn't as great as it seems (at least at first). Right now their setup probably looks something like this:

PDF -> Internal Representation -> Flash viewer

In principle they should only need to change to

PDF -> Internal Representation -> HTML5 viewer

That alone should make a huge different in terms of time needed.
But you don't need to be constantly updating DRM to meet this level of difficulty.
Yep. It was clever of us to invest months of engineering time on this while also arranging for the Apple/Adobe schism to continue to worsen, and talk Steve Jobs into posting his thoughts at just the right time to frame our launch.

We're just that amazing. ;]
Rank is a flawed structure that is ill-fitting to the talent pool - Guru.com
i can picture jobs big smug now.
I find this distateful.

There's no Earthly reason to make those connections public except to expose personally-identifying information that the individual may not want to have exposed. This, to me, is a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.

Take my advice: pull the plug.
I think it's very challenging for Apple. Apple is making a skyrocketing revenue because iPad and iPhone sales has boomed. But iPad won't sell for 300K piece everyday, that only happened the first day... actually it can sell! Yes, but there is an interesting point (so that it sells at such high rate): Apple "must" dominate the market.

For the iPhone, the competition is now fierce: Android, BlackBerry, Palm, Windows mobile and Nokia! Nokia is already a major player, they won't let Apple take the market easily and cheaply. They'll do marketing, new phones and crazy things to preserve their position.

That said, as competition is getting though, Apple has got to spend more on marketing and improving their products (taking down their profit, even if their sales are up, because they are spending more). Only if they dominate the market, then your investment will pay back.

My advice is: don't get in this stock. It's very risky; unless you believe that the iPhone and iPad will become standards ;)
California’s Woes and Prop 13
Embedding in general will be interesting... being able to ctrl+c/ctrl+v anything you want straight to your blog/website/spam site has to impact their reach.
13 kinds of money - which one do you have/want?
"Maximize your serendipity." - Nassim Taleb

"No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A regular paycheck and crack cocaine have a lot in common." - Felix Dennis

"Not the lowest hanging fruit. You want the highest RoI fruit." - Me =)
To be clear, I have no opinion about Opera now. My negative opinion expired a long time ago. Opera is merely one of the "browsers I don't use" in the same category as Konqueror, Safari, and Epiphany.

What it did was lose me at the only point it ever mattered for a product with a long life. Firefox has satisfied my needs since, and I've never had the will to evaluate Opera again.
Sorry i don't understand - who's the person in the first photo?
you have to log in to read documents on Scribd? i've never had to.
Foursquare-Using BART Riders Sometimes Use Foursquare, And Love The Color Blue
It's a prototype; of course it crashed. But I don't understand why mobile Flash demos usually entail watching a YouTube movie... isn't that a solved problem? Doesn't seem like a good selling point for Flash.
What you did was a more than a PR stunt. The "betting the company" line is just dramatic hyperbole. I consider "betting the company" to be saying - OK, if X happens I'll shut down the company, if !X happens you'll buy my company for 100M dollars.

In reality what you are saying is that if X happens, you waste alot of time, if !X happens then there is still no guaranteed outcome.
Ironically the page is causing me a stack overflow in IE8.
Seconded. Delicious still does it for me. Tagging is a great way to find things in piles of hundreds/thousands of bookmarks. Sure beats having to organize them all in your browser... :-/
Did Goldman Sachs cause the collapse of the housing bubble or just exploit it?
Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle.

About matter at hand: I don't understand why everyone must chime in on this "Apple is evil" meme. Maybe I'm losing my sense of humor, but I must say that I didn't find this particularly funny. As an Apple user I'm at the point where I'm thinking of switching away from the platform, but the constant repetition of posts like this is getting rather old.
I have to say I agree with Sean here... Read the fine print before you commit your digital life into the hands of strangers... Yes, even if they come dressed in slick Web2.0 shininess, they are still strangers and once you hit that "I Accept" button you actually (surprisingly!) do accept those Terms & Conditions... and almost always the T & C fine print has the information that says this website/company/service may be gone without warning anytime !!!

Don't expect to be bailed out just because you were dumb... Oh wait, this is the USA, people expect to be bailed out all the time here, don't they?

BTW, a very true saying, quite relevant in the USA is: "VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS"... if you don't like a service, don't support it... and if you do like the service, be ready to vote for it with your $$$s.
> " It's not hard to make arguments for why it's a good thing people are too embarrassed to have sex in public"

Why? Not that I'd do it mind you - but that's a limitations in how I've been raised. When I think about it, there's nothing really objectively wrong about having sex in public.
Most things certainly are simple in principle.
Was it to view them as the source PDF rather than their Flash approximations, then? I can't remember, but they /did/ get on my nerves more than once requiring an account to get at the hosted content.
Those are all "hardware patents" which is apparently totally fine in the Linux world... because someone else is responsible for paying the license fees.
Alpha software is alpha-quality. It takes time to get things right.

My pre-release stuff is full of bugs...which is why it's pre-release. Seems like it's a bit early to judge the quality of their product.
I heartily agree. A good education isn't about learning things per se, it's about learning how to learn.
I like strong typing and compilation errors
I guess you can see it as entitlement on the part of the consumer but I see a sense of entitlement here on the part of the publisher. And who said anything about not sacrificing quality? You're projecting your fears onto me, hardly a fair argument.

The logic here is simple. If you provide a service, you have a moral obligation to treat those who use it with some modicum of respect. You obviously see some gain in being in the business or you wouldn't be there.

To say that I don't "consider the obvious" assumes that I've managed to put into a short blog post all my thoughts on the subject, again hardly a fair observation. I agree that if you have information that is valuable, you should pay for its storage and use or have it backed up. But that is obviously not true of a huge percentage of Internet users.

I don't advocate regulation. I wonder out loud if that's a viable solution. There are other approaches, such as a non-profit escrow system of some sort.

I just don't think it's considerate or in one's own enlightened self-interest to behave as if users of your free service are entitled to expect nothing. That just feels like a dishonorable way to do business.
Fascinating. You judge me in my entirety as an enemy of the future just because I post a single message with which you disagree. You indicate by your response that you prefer tossing word-bombs and accusations around in ad hominem attacks rather than engaging in meaningful dialog.
I would argue that their culture is significantly different to that of the USA.
Because of a single video on YouTube? Or because that video is on HackerNews?
Regulate free services = free services are nothing but downside for the service provider -> no more free services.

It's pretty simple logic. The cure is worse than the disease.

Though I wonder if I'm being played. This reads like a parody of the big government position. "I've been abused by the big bad free internet photo services and I need daddy government to come save me!"? Anyone actually this helpless without big daddy government coming to their rescue has bigger problems.
It's 2010. Apple decided Flash wasn't ready in 2007, and it obviously still isn't.
Ask HN: Feedback on my weekend project
http://improvemyimage.com/

Threw it together a month or two ago when I wanted to get some exposure to MTurk. I have a lot of ideas for it, but it's just something to get me through coder's block with my startup.

Any feedback would be great.
Scoop: Apple Is Pushing A Secret “VIP” Ad Program For iPhone Apps
Clickable link:

http://improvemyimage.com/
If you continue to do what you do,
you will continue to get what you get.

--Anon, Chinese proverb
It's a classic Streisand blunder.
Do you have any data / links on this phenomenon? It has the ring of an urban legend, but I could be wrong.
They'll still be the best tools...

We're so patient with our tools; I can't imagine a carpenter launching a "shop management" app to restart his hammer interface...
I do not advocate government regulation. I raise it as a possibility hoping others will offer better solutions. So far, nobody has.

It is clear that, as a matter of law, users of free services are not entitled to any expectation of treatment. It is also true that as a matter of courtesy and integrity that those who supply such free services have a better plan than "Screw you, I'm outta here" in mind for if/when things go in a different direction.
Has anyone been able to connect a VPN with openvpn? That, plus a mysql client that gracefully re-connects when the server kills you, would be worth much more than $5 to me.
No disagreement. See my earlier reply just above. I tossed that idea out to see if it would stimulate some thinking about a good way to address the issue.
cult or culture?
The number of Googlers moving to Seattle post IPO was very very small. Most growth in our office came from local hiring. I believe the company tried to filter this out. That isn't to say there aren't one or two though...
If that were the case, then HP should already be selling memristor memories to compete with flash memories. Flash is already a huge market, HP does not have to wait until memristors can compete with RAM.
> We feel pretty strongly that even someone doing 10M videos/month is better off using a service like ours rather than investing in a custom solution. But we're biased, of course.

Speaking as a company that reluctantly made a decision to offer this for our customers when we couldn't find (a few years ago) an affordable volume solution to outsource, I agree with you completely.

Given the rate of change and state of tools, running even an in-house encoding solution is likely to be a much bigger undertaking than expected.

In-house IT staff would need to understand distributed computing, dynamic load based provisioning, web services software development, and somehow, blended with that, the black art of producing good looking video at low bitrates using minimal CPU time. Any one of these areas is a full discipline on its own.

If I understand correctly, Posterous got funding, and is pushing this part out the door to Zencoder. That's a smart decision. Focus on what you do.

The video industry needs more Zencoders and fewer people trying to do it in house. There are still far more backlogs of unencoded video than there are movies online.
That is a politically conservative perspective and I respect your right to hold it. I don't see government as inherently bad, evil or inefficient, let alone uncaring.
"I raise it as a possibility hoping others will offer better solutions. So far, nobody has."

Yes, we have. "Do nothing." It's a pretty simple solution.

And more to the point, you should stop using free services right now. You don't accept their service level. Fine. That's your right. Just stop, then. It's that simple. Find someone with a service level you do accept.

If you're using Facebook, for example, stop. I'm not being sarcastic. I don't use Facebook precisely because I don't agree with their service level or other policies, either. I'm not their customer, I'm their product, so I simply don't use them. I can and have put my money(/attention) where my mouth is.

You got burned. You learned. That's the solution, right there: You learned. Now, apply it.
The point was that a gun ban does not equal no guns. Also you need to understand that the demographics vary widely.
Getting to grips with The Silmarillion: what it isn't and what it is
Previous post and discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809493
I didn't know android or mobile flash are still prototypes...
I think the point is that Apple poo-poos the idea that a phone even needs a background API, then releases a background API to great fanfare as if they were the first ones to have such an idea, all the while patting themselves on the back. (i.e. "We weren't the first ones to do multi-tasking, but we were the first ones to do multi-tasking on the iPhone! Yay us!")
> Just how should the police generally execute a search
> warrant? If the suspect doesn't answer the door, should
> they leave a polite note and come back several hours
> later once the suspect has had a chance to smash the
> computers with a hammer, set fire to the paper evidence, > and flee to Barbados?

Yes, actually.
Chrome Feature Request: Include commonly used JS libraries directly in browser
the stuff preceeding the => declares what typeclasses the types you mention later should fall into.

That makes it clear. Thank you!
Yeah, it's definitely missing some sort of.. "what to do next" immediacy. README support could help with that (though some READMEs are crazy long and go far off track). Typical gem descriptions aren't long enough or well formatted enough to work.
Poke them to release their formatting code as a library. All you'd really need is a format(text, filename) => HTML function, right?
Communities are a means to an end. If a manufacturing plant town in Michigan loses a GM plant, let the people move out to other communities where they need to hire people. Don't tax successful communities to prop it up. We've had ghost towns in this country before.
Is Apple becoming the Microsoft of mobile?
That's because there is no better alternative. Without regulation you're just asking providers of free services to spend their time and money on integrating with a non-profit or NGO-provided... what? Data vault? That would only help with preserving raw data, not the social network that's the actual valuable part of systems like Twitter.

Courtesy and integrity for free services which change direction involves giving people sufficient notice, if possible, and allowing people to export their data, if possible. That's all! Anything more is a ridiculous expectation.

Sometimes it's not possible. You might think that you're going to secure funding in time, and then you don't, and you don't have the money to pay Amazon this month and now your service is gone.

Do you think that people who start free services on the internet have an obligation to supply that service, even if it means they pay for it instead of paying their rent? Should the founders of FreeWebService have to live on the street so that you can keep your social network alive?

Of course, if there were an American-tax-payer-funded NGO which would support my free web service when I ran out of money, I would definitely make a lot more free web services. I think a lot of people outside of the US would. :oD
If you look at the YouTube player UI in the demo, it appears to be YouTube's HTML5 player, not their Flash player.

Edit: I've been corrected here - for some Flash videos, they use the HTML5 style UI, and for some Flash videos they use the old style one. Presumably the demo really was Flash, although I'm not sure why you'd want Flash over HTML5 on a browser that supports it like the Android one.
My concern would be this:

1) Flash is prevalent today. No matter how much people are bashing it on HN, its widely used especially on the sites which are incredibly popular.
2) HTML5 adoption will be slow. Look at how long it to ie6 to die and you'll have an idea of how long it will take html5 to become prevalent.
3) You're taking a technology that allows you to be accessible today and trading it for a technology which will allow you to be accessible at some unknown time in the future, basically removing any barrier to entry for your competitors.

The hyperbole makes this seem worse then it is, I'm sure. You don't really have motivation to ditch your current flash implementation. You'll just put it into a "support as needed" mode.
Back to the Future at Interop
1000 years?
I would be interested in anybody over 40 who thinks things are much the same as they were before, and anybody under 20 who thinks the guy is on to something.

Lots of generational bias in the comments so far.

I know I've seen the drift, and I strongly suspect that shame, guilt, and embarrassment serve a greater societal function than we give them credit for. The discussion is very reminiscent to me of the free love movement back in the 1960s. Everybody wondered why you just couldn't turn on, tune in, drop out, and have all the sex you wanted. Love one another. Sounded great. Then the societal bill came due, and it wasn't pretty -- STDs, junkies, crime, rapes, lost lives, the me generation. Looked great on paper. Didn't work so well in reality. My feeling is that this TMI stuff is going to turn out the same way. But I'm as biased as the next guy.
It doesn't necessarily mean it's a 'crap deal.' It just means that it's a 'crap deal' by comparison to other opportunities out there. I'm sure being a doctor in a rural area is a 'better deal' than a lot of other jobs out there that Americans do.
I'm sorry you feel insulted; that was not my intention. I meant to categorize you according to Postrel's framework. Nevertheless, I think your point is wrong and you should read the book for a clear explanation of exactly why.
Seems like it's a bit early to judge the quality of their product.

Seems like an excellent idea to keep it in the lab and out of the public eye, then.
What is a greater soulsuck - consulting or a full-time job? I work FT (and PT on my venture) and often wonder if consulting would be a better or worse soulsuck.
So has Jobs' other company (Pixar).
This is great but (unfortunately) it's not quite right. The author seems to have forgotten the difference between a program without specified inputs -- which can't be said to "halt" or "not halt", because it might halt on some inputs and loop on others -- and a program with specified inputs, which always either halts or loops.

Thus at one point the poem asks whether Q halts without specifying an input to Q. This question is meaningless.

The correct proof is given by BrandonM in a thread somewhere on this page. Check it out. (scott_s restates the incorrect proof above BrandonM, for comparison.)
So then by your logic, the Victorian era should have been a "societal" golden age. But:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#Notable_syphilis-infec...
didn't both colbert and stewart mock specific products as well as the company as a whole?
Scare quotes? How "mature".
Automatically generate a really good (or really bad) TED talk
Their Flash player now has the same UI.
Are you forgetting Darfur? North Korea? Iraq? Pervasive forced labor worldwide?

Maybe you should study some recent history. The list goes on an on.
They just changed their Flash player interface; that is it. The HTML5 player looks like the older Flash interface.