skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some goals recede further into the distance the harder you try to reach them. You can't work at having an authentic relationship with your customers, you have to talk to them like a real person.

In it's practical application it's a bit of a jedi mind trick; you can't force yourself to be more authentic than you are at any given point in time; you just have to relax and be, authentically.

I'd agree with you on the overuse of certain tropes, pretty much any community has a few terms that are never precisely defined that are used as shorthand to frame a loose group of ideas "lean startups", "social media", "agile"; they'll be used and abused and everyone involved will have a slightly different piece of the elephant in mind when they use the term. But within the community they aren't used as precise technical terms, but rather as signals of allegiance to one sub-group or ideology.
there is little if any evidence to show that they actually make us any safer

I'd argue that they don't. A friend of mine was writing a paper titled How to hijack a plane with items you bought in the duty free, though he never released it. In the book Emergency, Neil Strauss mentions conceiled blades in credit cards, ceramic hair clips and other items that various people he talked to bring on to planes as "emergency weapons". I heard from a friend about someone who brought drugs through security by having them in a bag of peanuts or something, which he was eating on his way through (you probably can't always get away with conceiling items like this, but maybe..). If you really want, you can bring all kinds of prohibited items on to planes.

So, no, the security does not make us any safer.
Best. Article. Ever... amen.
Clustrix (YC W06) Builds the Webscale Holy Grail: A Database That Scales
They are asking because auto opt-in drew the ire of legislators, now they have the "we asked!" defense. Of course as this and other (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_high_pressure...) articles point out, the opt-in is both unclear and a bit forceful.

Also FB has had backlash before over making things public so they are trying to nip that in the bud beforehand by allowing the vocal minority who understands/pays attention to this stuff to opt-out while the masses just click the "Accept All" button.
The same thing exists for Jane Austen, like http://www.austen.com/.
Google pushes Chrome on the front page of Google.com. And they pushed Firefox for a few years before Chrome.

Also, Opera has a terrible name in comparison to the competition. Makes word of mouth less effective. That's also my theory on MySQL vs Postgres.
"Most colleges designate certain classes as "writing intensive," meaning, you have to write an awful lot to pass them. Look for those classes and take them! Seek out classes in any field that have weekly or daily written assignments."

Good advice here. Get in the habit of WRITING (in a form that keeps an archive, that is email preferably over unarchived chat) to professors about any issue that comes up in class.
There's also thrift shops and garage sales. ("Who wants Grandma's old, clunky cookware?"). Just be comfortable that you're not buying one that some ignoramus used to melt lead or who knows what.
With this move, Facebook is turning many of your before-private profile fields into now-public "Page" connections. Any most users don't realize by clicking that blue button they are making everything public.
I've read a couple of things that makes you wonder why the author bothered to "steal" the setting at all, when they could quite clearly make their own.

That's branding in action. Some people think "branding" is only about logos and letterheads, but it can come down as far as a group of characters and a setting in a story, too. Having the same characters and setting as novels they've already enjoyed, Harry Potter fans would probably get more out of even badly written fan fiction than they would from an all-new environment.

(From the author's point of view, perhaps they just didn't get a break or didn't have the determination to make it. At least by hijacking the Potter brand, they might get read.)

When I was a kid in the early 80s, I had a racing game where you could set the names of the other drivers to anything you liked.. so I set them to names of my friends, family members, etc, and it made the game far more fun even though there was no logical reason for it. Instead of winning a race against generically named computer racers, instead I could be kicking my grandpa's ass until the last corner.. there's something fun about that. So it goes with fan fiction, themed/cartoon porn, and similar pastiches.
Because Adobe pitches a fit about anything MS does to make working with PDF's free. You may not be aware of this but MS Office 2003 was supposed to have the ability to save to PDF builtin-but Adobe threw a huge hissy fit about MS cutting into their markets so MS took it out (there has been an add-on available as a download since it was released-but Adobe insisted the functionality not be included by default)
They were not automatically public before, that is a much bigger deal than the change from search to page.
Sure. The dropoff is gradual as weather gets better. It's not a step function.

Maybe I should just resign myself to saying everything in twice as many words...
My Linux setup is like this, but it's nice to have the "long tail" readily available. Stuff like SBCL and GHC are a pain to manually compile (or get from ports), and this leads to a cycle where since there's no GHC, there's no GHC. Compare to Debian where the latest version is almost always available, and so building $latest + 1 is trivial.
That's not the point--Mac _natively_ can render a PDF. You have to download a separate reader on a Windows machine.
We are using Grafico which is based on based on Raphaël and Prototype.js. It lacks PieCharts which g.Raphaël has. See: http://grafico.kilianvalkhof.com/
kill-region?
You have no proof that this what they did, you are just making stuff up. Not sure how you got modded up. The press release said they have sold 1.5 million books, this would indicate the free book is not included.

Also, not everybody has the iBooks applicaiton, since as you say, it is a download, and does not come with the device.
Scientists Explain Why Computers Crash But We Don't
It does not appear to be related... which risks a legal nastygram from the HARO guy.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100228/1646008328.shtml
Javascript/html/css etc were designed to be very small, use very little bandwidth. Flash also thrived and won with this aim. Going this route sounds nice but the battles and bloat would be immense. The web is a thin client, it can do fat client stuff but it is ultimately designed to be thin. That is what made it ubiquitous, not being a fat client...

What this is, is making an application for the desktop. They can take a branch of Webkit or Firefox and add CLI but they could also just make their own downloadable app to do this.

I like the idea I just think this might wreck the one standard thing we got going in javascript as the glue of the web. A scripting language can bend to the changes as it has done with minimal versions. It could be faster and bytecode itself sure but still it has worked well to tie things together. Silverlight and Flash can partially do this but you still have sandbox issues, which it would also have to have. You'd still have limitations yet it would be a jungle. Right now the jungle is the plugin. Lots of innovation but also lots of differentiation, legacy, etc.

I do think that the browser cache needs more space, Javascript engines could be faster, Canvas support and hardware acceleration are needed quickly. Maybe the CLI would be the way but everything we do with the web is design by committee, most of the stuff that made it in that works so well was made when they were still small and non-existent as a market. Everything from here on out will be slowwww to change.

HTML/Javascript/css is all just text. If this new system could have app descriptions as small and as readable/runnable by future generations then I think it could work.
He mentioned living in the UK a few posts back.
Here is a simpler aproach in Python. http://blog.devartis.com/2009/09/25/musikalisches-wurfelspie...
to have the transaction go through on your site makes it feel more official

You tech people keep forgetting that reading a URL bar requires superpowers. I guaranteed you, having suffered many customer support incidents because of this: many people cannot tell the difference between getting redirected to Google/Paypal and the site they were originally on. (For that matter, a huge portion of my customers don't understand that I am not Yahoo or Internet Explorer.)
I think it's a common way haters lampoon it, but I think it shows poor comprehension of the message.
I just recently heard about a mobile project called KeyRing. They seem to scan the barcodes from your cards and store them on your phone.

http://androinica.com/2009/05/07/keyring-app-digitizes-store...
Readability - Uncluter what you're reading
That's quite a lot of exclamation points.

And I just think it's possible that HP is finally getting a clue. Buying Palm is a good sign, because really, why else would they buy it if they're not planning on actually using WebOS?
Somewhere Raymond Scott is smiling
> took time to become mainstream

One more important event is not mentioned. Internet became a mainstream thing in middle 90' - that's more or less when the flood of buffer overflows and format string exploits really started. Before that, network apps were mostly created and used by people who "knew stuff" in general...
This comes in handy for regular folks http://www.crisisofcredit.com/
Pimpin’ Software Projects Ain’t Easy
Doesn't this just push the problem up the stack one layer? Now the W3C needs to define a specification for a virtual machine that can implement all of the current web specifications performantly. If your VM is missing an API to perform some new form of user input (like multitouch) or a rendering method for a new standard (like webgl) you'll need to head back to a standards body to add more hooks, leaving us in the same position.

I think the idea has merit, but the current landscape of software development highly favours the statically compiled C++ browser engines, especially on mobile devices.
A bytecode for JS would be more optimal for other languages than the status quo: compiling to lexical javascript.

I they added a few extra bytecodes for stuff like TCO or goto or integers, it'd be pretty fantastic.
Watch some of Ephidrena's old 4k demos on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6mynON6eQI

(If you have an Amiga lying around you can run the actual demo)

That's multi channel digital audio (+ graphics) in under 4000 bytes. Wolfram sounds like the ROM off a synthesizer back in the early 90's.
Love the last line: "Next step in the thought experiment: after wondering what NY would look like this weekend if run by the TSA, imagining what the TSA might be like if run in the spirit of this weekend's NY."
The more people that dump supporting it the better. Once enough sites break and pop up a "Your browser is too old!" message, it will eventually piss off the right executives to get IE6 dumped out of corporate environment.

An anecdote that you can extrapolate at will. I remember a while back my dad (an EVP at a large chemical company, not exactly bleeding edge IT considering they had Windows 2000 after Vista was out) was astounded to find out YouTube was blocked for most of the employees, but not for him. They started posting instructional videos on YouTube and he only found out because his marketing guys couldn't open the videos they had created. The ban was gone within an hour, after it had been in place for who knows how long.

Enough websites break and you get the executives calling their IT guys saying "why doesn't this work for me, I need a new computer" and eventually things will get changed. In the meantime, a lot of IT departments hunker down and don't want to change anything because people ALWAYS complain when there is change.

Simple truism of office politics - if it is the executives idea it is "great", if it is the IT department's idea, it "sucks", regardless of technical merit.
I'd kind of agree with you on the names. I can't even pronounce Postgres so I tend to sit quietly instead of recommending it when the topic comes up.

I'll be sure to run my next product name by you.
You are really stretching it if you are trying to say Facebook isn't trying to exploit private data to the fullest extent possible.

A more apt analogy using your theme would be this: Saddam Hussein didn't kill anyone, his soldiers did. Only a pedant would be worried about the literal meaning without looking at the big picture.
Bryan,

Can you add an email to your profile, or shoot me one?

Really, it's good to have a human being reachable. I was at your site all morning, comparing you to Zuora, and this couldn't have come a better time.
It’s this way for anyone who’s good or bad at anything.

If you’re not good, you’ll be confused and clumsily try to get the results you want. If you’re good, you actually understand what you’re doing and make deliberate strokes.
PDF became an open standard in 2008, but before that the format was still well specified and openly published.
This is the main thing I dislike about Windows. In OS X I constantly use PDFs: print to PDF, export as PDF, quickly preview PDFs. In Windows those things either require 3rd party software and/or way more time to launch programs.
Waiting for the day IE goes down to single digit. Even if IE8/9 is the most compliant browser in their history, you can never trust them when it comes to embracing open standards. For the longest time they held the whole web back from innovation.

I still remember countless hours of IE hacks. DIE, DIE!
You don't necessarily have to have citizenship of a country to live there. Nor do you have to live in the same country that the rest of your family lives in.

I'm just wondering how much (if any) of his/friends/families experience is due to something unfortunate (such as racial profiling) vs how much (again, if any) is simply being blown out of proportion.
AFAIK^^ interests on new profiles are set as "Friends Only" by defaults and that was one of the defaults on the previous privacy rollout for pre-existing users after the cry out.

All this does is change how the interests actually link (They used to be linked to a search field seeing who else had that text, Now they link to pre-formatted fan pages which still show who else like it but with descriptions from Wikipedia.)

^^Will need to check on my Alt FB account.
Do you charge for it? How did you build it?
clickable: http://helpastartupout.com/
Sorry, what's google listen?
I tried Opera once a long time ago and it had ads in the browser. I became a firefox user and never looked back. Subsequently, firefox was the browser I'd recommend, etc..
Apple Draws Scrutiny From Regulators
How can the metal detector app work? I'm drawing a blank. Does anyone have any theories?
The latest beta of Chrome for Mac (5.0.342.9 beta) has been crashing (or rather, freezing a few tabs and then not working right until I kill it) pretty often, but other than that, I'm very satisfied with the browser in general and all the past versions have been rock solid.
The Pill Started More Than a Sexual Revolution
"... was an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Scott
Interesting to read that, but Chris and Peter are actually friends and he's very kindly helped provide guidance for this. I'll let you know if we get a call later though :-)
A SQL console for your Heroku app
It may of been well known, but anyone that tried to use it would of had to abibe by the license owner's wishes. Which according to other comments was Adobe not wanting it included which meant they couldn't without a lawsuit being introduced.
Wow, top story on HN. Thanks, folks! I wanted to call out a number of things I glossed over to see if it's worth doing a follow up or seventeen:

* Personal guarantee. Most merchant account providers require a personal guarantee. I signed one for Dawdle.com, but I never would again, even if it costs me more.
* Recurring billing. There are a number of startups focused here, including Recurly, Chargify, Spreedly, and CheddarGetter.
* PCI compliance. The physical access tenet makes it technically impossible to be compliant if you're using any cloud hosting provider for e-commerce; in reality, almost no one is PCI compliant.
* Gateways. There are a bunch. ActiveMerchant (Ruby gem open sourced by the good folks at Shopify) can do basic handshakes with most. There isn't an AM equivalent for Python, PHP, or other common languages that I know of.
* Processors. First Data ostensibly processes 75% of credit cards in the U.S. This is a more academic topic than the others, but it's terribly interesting if you want to understand why online payments are the clusterfuck they are.
* Chargebacks. You'll almost never win one.
* AVS and CVV. They protect you, but goddamn, are they expensive to process. AVS can sometimes cost you a dime (or more!) every time you check a card - and it rarely works on non-U.S. addresses (and American Express often fucks up apartment addresses even within the U.S.).
* Vaults versus reference transactions. Reference transactions are an elegant way to handle credit card data, but they lock you into the gateway. Vaults give you portability, but those providers are always more expensive than the ref tranx folks.
That is true, but it is much easier to accurately implement a VM spec correctly than complex high-level specs like CSS and HTML, which leave a lot of ambiguity. New hardware interfaces are also a lot easier to specify when you're talking about functions which are rarely going to be called directly by human programmers, since they will usually be accessed through higher-level frameworks.

Overall, the goal is to make implementing a browser a much simpler and direct process, and to defer as much complexity as possible to libraries which can be easily downloaded and updated. This would not only result in more a heterogeneous ecosystem for web developers, but fewer browser bugs and incompatibilities.
Extension.fm: A New Music Library
Consider:

"Heck, you don't even need to build it into the OS. Just make it an optional download such as your Save As PDF add-in for Office."

And:

"Your customers are tired of the exploits and the complications that so many of today's PDF readers include."

The authors are asking Microsoft to write an application that reads PDFs and isn't Adobe Reader. My point is that such an application already exists, is free to download and use, and is both faster and more secure than Adobe's reader.
Isn't this the same industry that screamed bloody murder when MSFT decided to produce a free anti-virus for Windows 7?
Not to mention Preview is super fast and light compared to bloatware Acrobat Reader.
I think it's 9.5%, same as CA.
This is true. But it precludes you from doing two-click checkouts on the second transaction (wink wink) and real users really don't have a problem whipping out their credit cards on a new site.
The Appalling Reaction to the Apple iPhone Leak
A more relavant truism to the IE6 in business debacle is that upgrading a platform is costly and enhancing users' web-browsing experience is rarely a top priority.
You've pin-pointed it. Without a commonly available transmission vector, buffer overflow exploits were the hard way to get around - and if you weren't coming from across a network, you likely already had full control over the local machine, as it was probably running DOS, Windows 3.11, Win 95, etc. Much easier was boot sector viruses, particularly since PCs by default tried to boot off any floppy left in the drive when turned on; that, and infected executables.
Sure, but I would think that knowing what people are searching for is more valuable. Also, based on a quick scan on alexa.com, the top 100 (global) sites are a mix of search engines, social networks, news and porn sites. I doubt the search engines and social networks will adopt the like button and I'm not sure how much you learn about someone's interests based on the news they read and porn they watch.

Maybe they'll partner up with Microsoft and monitor your searches on Bing. I think they already show results from Bing when you search on Facebook.
That's a great point. I wonder why it gets dismissed so much?
They make an insane amount of money from the way that enterprises spend hundreds of dollars on Acrobat Professional licenses for every single computer. Sometimes they wise up and implement a baroque license management server where they only have to pay for a fraction of the licenses, but it still costs an insane amount of money.

When it gets used, it's almost exclusively for "Print to PDF". Power Users will use it to combine PDFs, and maybe do some shitty doodling. Occasionally the awful PDF forms functionality gets used, but they usually learn their lesson (easy to make one worse than an MS Access app!)

It's the calf to Microsoft's Office cash cow.
Here it is for Office 2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d9...
Background: Microsoft, Adobe squabble over PDF [2006]
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1012_3-6079320.html
Top 5 Low Cost QWERTY Mobiles in India
A suggestion to overcome this: if your sentence's meaning relies on an adjective, it needs a better verb.
I think I know what you mean. A while back a saw a "why am I me and not someone else?" type question on Ask Reddit. And everyone had these pre-canned answers they thought were obvious. I got really frustrated that no one seemed to think it was an interesting question.

Or am I the only one who thinks that's a legimate question?
Once I learned that it works for the bookmarks, I prefer it that way too. Especially for the bookmarklets for delicious, yc (thread-collapser), and instapaper: just mash the key, and I never need to touch the track pad.

On Safari+OSX, cmd-{ / cmd-} switch tabs. I'd still like a to-beginning / to-end key pair (maybe cmd-[], and reversed?), but that's pretty minor compared to not needing to navigate with a cursor.
How easy/painful would it be to switch from PayPal Standard to Authorize.Net or PayPal Payflow Pro, if the situation arises?
The title should be changed to say it is from 2005.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality! I posit that it is the best Harry Potter fanfiction of all time.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
Hey, they do it all the time on CSI and in real-time - get with the program, man!
I'd say they're probably trying to avoid another massive fine from the EU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_compet...
(also the creator of most music you remember from Warner Bros. cartoons, and inventor of the electronium, a totally analog machine that composed its own tunes, customizable by the "performer")
Good for them and all, and I know they're still kind of stealth mode, but this article doesn't say much to me.

It's not that I doubt they can deliver, I just want to see some numbers. The one graph I could find (http://www.clustrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/clustrix-...) really doesn't say much, and to be honest, I can't even really tell how I'm supposed to be reading it.

You don't go and build the best sports car in the world and then tell everyone "it goes really fast", you show videos of it screaming around a curvy mountain road. I want my curvy mountain road video.
bryan.johnson@getbraintree.com
I think a follow up is a great idea
But typically I have more than 10 tabs opened.

Nice to know though. I'm also pleased that it is available for Windows 7, might make my whole Windows 7 experience much more smooth.

Is there anything similar for Ubuntu? With cairo dock perhaps?
So you've traveled across the border by car then, I take it? :)